Well, after quite a thorough evaluation of all of small shop CAM products for lathe and mill (3D plus indexed 4th) I jumped into BobCAD-CAM v27 with both feet! I am setting things up for my workflow and equipment and it is pretty straight forward. I already appreciate many of it's capabilities like preconfigured / editable strategies. This will save me a lot of time and broken tooling!

I do have a question on how to manage tools. As a small shop I have a few tools that do the lion's share of work. I see that BobCAM separated End Mill Roughing from Finishing tools. I typically use the same tool for both operations - say a 3/16" 4 flute HSS end mill. I have created the set of Roughing end mills that I use with manual numbering (so they match my tool table in Mach3). I would like to have the same set of tools available as my Finishing end mills. But, when I view the ENDMILL FINISH tools in the Tool Library I see a completely different set of tools. This probably makes sense for the big production shops but not the way I work. Is there an easy way to copy/transfer my roughing tools to the finishing section or do I have to create the set again manually? OR is there a different / alternative workflow to deal with this?

regards,
Michael