Another plasma component...

i have been chatting with bobcad about their plasma cam package. thy said thy had a version for home hobbyists. I got all excited and then i find out its on sale for $499 but for home use its 399. kinda blows the budget out of the water compared to the other software out there.

Unless you require some special interoperablity don't go with any high dollar commercial package for plasma. It is simple 2D that can be done with open source or low cost tools. The more capable the tools the longer the learning curve to get proficient. You already have asked someone for a drawing in a .dwg format which tells me you already have 2D CAD. From one of those CAD programs you can export to Inkscape (free) or SheetCam (about $170) and do your CAM. This is really the simplest CAM there is to do. Actually my guess is that knife blanks are so simple that you can hand code them from drawing dimensions pretty easily. When you get into full sheet nesting of parts that aren't just simple closed shapes is when hand work gets tough. Because you are just starting out on a budget and I suspect not going to be cutting full sheets right away I strongly suggest finding the beginning HAAS training books on line and going through them working the examples. In the mean time install Inkscape with Gcodetools (I think it is part of the default distro now) and practice with simple closed shapes.

John

Also worth pointing out that Les (SheetCAM) is "one of us"

github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/blob/0f91c5...ents/message.comp#L5

I use to use solidworks with esprit for all my milling. Started out hand coding using autocad 98 and the list function to get my xyz. I then moved to BobCAD r19 I think it was. And then onto solidworks and esprit. After that I moved onto a few other cam packages but solidworks and good ol autocad is my workhorse. I do still have a seat for BobCAD 19 back when a seat was an actual usb dongle. I had thought about digging it out to see if I could get that to work with plasma. Guess anything is possible with a bunch of modifications to the post. That’s what started the conversation with them. Sheet cam does look nice and I did download it and played with it a bit.

Ok, if I was running a job shop and paying for a bigger than 4' X 8' table with a hidef plasma I would defiantly be looking at using ProNest or something similar. Small table, air plasma go for SheetCam. Like I said before I paid for my license the first week I had it, just profit for the last three years. Your Acad or .dfx out from Solidworks will work fine. If your margins can't support SC then you are in the wrong business.

I'm not sure that I will say that SC is nice, especially the Linux version. But I have made plenty of profit with it and the cost of entry is ridiculously low. Using .dxf files for import bypasses its biggest weakness at the expense really nice Gcode. If you are cutting .25" or thicker you will never notice the difference.

Actually your knife blanks maybe simple (at least the ones I've had people ask me to cut) enough you can just use the free trial.

John

As most of users here have mentioned, use inkscape or sheetcam, most of the other CAM's are not worth any money ( the cheaper ones under 1000$ ). Last year one of my clients pay'd some hefty money on some of them and tested some demo versions, but the end result is : he uses inkscape now. He paid over 2000 euro for all those cam's that did some things good and some things could not do at all. One of them is mentioned above, not mentioning it as i did not try them at all, so can not give my opinion here.
Sheetcam is very good and very usable and the price is very low.