I am a complete newbie to machining and CNC. I am a part time knife maker and would like to get a mill for profiling blanks, drilling holes, milling spine work, making small folder parts, and possibly even trying to machine the bevels on a knife blank. Would also like to be able to make handle blanks with various textures out of G10, Micarta, Carbon Fiber, etc...

A friend of mine is trying to talk me into a bridgeport. We looked around locally and found a Gorton Mastermill 1-22 in very good condition for 1250. I am very close to buying it and then came to my senses that it probably would not be able to do most of the things that I am trying to do. It is also nearly 2ton and take up a whole bunch of space that I don't have.

I am looking into a medium size CNC machine such as the Tormach, CNC Masters CNC Jr, or maybe even the X3.

How long would it take a complete noob to learn how to use a CNC Machine to proficiently to make parts.

From what I can understand... I need to design the part in CAD or similar software then use CAM to generate the G&M codes and then inputing it to the CNC machine to let it do its thing. How hard or easy would it be to learn these programs?

Sorry for the long post.

Hi. I have a machine similar to the CNC Masters CNC Jr. It is a cheap Rong-Fu mill retrofitted with steppers. I got a Rong-Fu mill from billstoolcrib.com and retrofitted it with parts from homeshopcnc.com. If you need precision I wouldn't recommend it, the spindle column that raises up and down isn't held precisely, it is more of a mill/drill and I constantly have to tweak my gcode to and coat it with heavy way oil to improve the accuracy. However, I see on their site that they have a new "cnc baron" maybe it is better, although it still looks like a retrofit. If you have the money then I'd go with the Tormach. I've been druling over that machine for a while. Good luck.