Emcoturn 120 lathe retrofit

LutzTD wrote: Im looking for a decent shareware 2D cad package so I can do this at home, I can do it in Solidworks or Pro/E Creo at work but at home I'm limited to Cambam which I don't like very much as a drawing package.

Check out Autodesk Fusion 360. It is free for enthusiasts and businesses making less than $100k/yr on designs drawn in Fusion.
-Tom

thanx Ill check that out. So far I downloaded one from dessalt ( maker of solidworks it was terrible), and also LibreCad which is similarly bad.

EDIT: yeah this isnt too bad. took me about an hour to do this, would have been a couple minutes in SW but theres a learning curve. It looks pretty much exactly what I was wanting for a home CAD software. Thanx again




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DXF out to CamBam

Fusion 360 is a new application being developed by Autodesk. As they bought HSMWorks not so long ago, they have included full 3D CAM inside (free!) Fusion, not just the 2.5D that you can plug in to Solidworks. I read yesterday that PocketCNC has got 5 axis CAM support in Fusion 360, so it sounds as if that is already implemented.

Despite being developed by Autodesk, it's reasonably easy to use, nothing like Autocad. Perhaps more like Onshape than Inventor or Solidworks. New features are being added but so far they have 3D CAD, simulation (FEA, vibration, thermal), surfacing, CAM and drawings. Not bad for free!! The Fusion 360 support forum is active and supportive.

Check out the Fusion 360 Youtube channel .

As a solidworks, pro/e Creo long time user I can see it has the typical issues with the low cost offerings. It isnt bad for small stuff but I see long term feature modification and some of the dissassociation of features as somewhat labor intensive in comparison. I will say at least that is much easier to manipulate then most of the free offerings I have tried. you can redimension a sketch and it modifies the model, but when I patterned a feature the pattern copies lost association and there was not a good way to copy feature that I found, but I have used it for about an hour so take this with that in mind. Also its not really fair to compare a free CAD package to two 5-7K offereings so on the flip side its really nice for a free offering and I was able to do a pretty easy job of making my plate, then making a copy and modifying it rather easy to the new shape. definitely better than a lot of packages out there, and the price is right. Its a keeper for me right now. I was also able to output DXF for the CAM program, looks like it outputs step, igs and others as well. Not too shabby.

The CAM is really very good. Fancy toolpaths and rapids at feed level.

andypugh wrote: The CAM is really very good. Fancy toolpaths and rapids at feed level.

are you talking about the CAM in Fusion 360? I didnt see that.