[Gaz.]

Hello everybody,

I have jsut purchased a small cnc machine and taking delivery on the 30th of november.

I own a Graphics company and would like to progress to cut out shop signs etc. My first question really is what else will i be able to make to sell on for a profit, i have racked my brains and can't think of anything.

Q2. I am looking to buy mach 3, i have downloaded the trial version with a rather crappy 50 lines of code, which is about half a letter in a fancy font.
Is there any other software for around the same price (which is also easy to use)

Also i need some cutting bits for a 3.175mm collar, to cut wood and acrylic, can anyone recomment any.

Thanks any help will be greatfully appreciated.

P.S sorry if i have posted in the wrong thread catagory(wrong)

[Crevice Reamer]

Hi Gaz. Welcome to the Zone!

I assume you have bought a CNC router? what size? What machine?

Mach3 is the defacto standard CNC control software. There's emc for free, but it's not as well supported. Anyway, control software is only a start. The REAL cost is the expensive Cad/Cam programs. If you are dreading the $150 for Mach3, you had better be sitting down when you see what Cad/CAM software costs.

Maybe some of this will be helpful to you:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78713.#3

CR.

[Gaz.]

Yes i have purchased a cnc machine the processing size is something like 17"X 12". I wanted something small to start with to get the gist of things.

I dont really need any cam software tbh, all that i am planing on using it for is cutting letters and i can just export these from corel as a plt file into lazy cam to generate the g-code for mach.
I think i will give mach 3 a go to start me off as it is all set up for my machine. I dont mind spending money for software if i am going to make money back off it, I spend £2500 a year for a software for my cnc machine, and is worth its weight in gold. But for something as simple as 5mm acrylic numbers i dont need anything too advanced.

[glenn@mynesting]

Hi Gaz,

Firstly, congrats on your new machine! :cheers:

If you ever need to lay out more than a handful of letters, you could try using some nesting software to efficiently arrange the parts in order to save material.

Generally speaking, this kind of software is expensive but we recently released our own software (found at www.mynesting.com) and it is currently free until the end of the year. Thereafter, it'll cost around £3-4 ($5-7) for each nesting job you choose to export (if you don't choose to export, it costs nothing to use). It should definitely save you some time compared to manually arranging your letters (and might save you in material costs too). Another cnczone member posted that they made a $600 saving in material on one job using MyNesting! That is perhaps one of the more extreme cases (and he must have been cutting a very expensive material) but it does go to show what is possible (http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...358#post674358)

Here's a nest result on some letter parts using MyNesting:



Please get in touch if you have any questions and I hope you find MyNesting to be a useful tool in the CNC toolbox.

Glenn