[yohudi]

New to CNC milling. I've handcrafted wooden toys and furniture for years ..... now interested in finding affordable 2d and 3d models primarily toys, carvings and art.

Any suggestions?

Hi there,

You have similar background and interests to my own. For carving and art resources I suggest regular visits to cnc4free.org... I host 25+ FREE Art or carving type models/reliefs every month, also 10 art type .DXFs... content is changed monthly, usually around the 15th or so... FreeMill is a good free option for relief carving if you dont have existing software to generate the 3D carving code

You might also be interested in learning to create your own relief or carving type content from bitmaps using FREE tools.. there are many FREE utilities that can perform this function to a very high standard.. it's just a matter of tuning the input images.. see the chapter 9 overview in the 'Tutorial' section of the same site.

For Toy's I'd reccomend a prowl of the FREE plans type sites.. it's usually fairly easy to adapt this kind of plan for CNC use.. thats how I made the ride on toy's pictured below... The plans were essentially an influence rather than a blueprint for the final toys, but they are a useful starting point for construction techniques etc. Again There are quite a few links to this kind of (FREE) plan on the links page at http://cnc4free.org

The design process employed making the motorbike type toy is shown in the chapter 13 overview as a 'CNC_Toolkit' case study. Gmax /CnC_toolkit is ideal for this kind of work. You can build the toy virtually using spline outlines or imported .DXF as starting point.. then apply the same oulines/splines to generate the cutting code.. It's an excellent, FREE, integrated solution...
hope this helps

Danny