Just bought Taig mini mill CNC/ new to CNC and machining

[duffy99]

Hi this is my first post so I thought I'd give you a brief intro , I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this post . I'm a Combat Vet with 3 tours of duty and 12 years of service as an Infantryman. I returned from my last tour in Afghanistan May last year and released do to service related injuries in September last year. I have recently taken up custom knife making for the past 6 or 7 months.

The thing that brought me to this forum is that I came across a Taig Mini Mill fully set up for CNC with stepper motors and computer yesterday basically never been used . I wasn't expecting to buy a Mini Mill or a CNC machine at that but when I was able to get it for a cheap price after some bartering $500 off the asking price for $600 total. The owner was a small business owner who did engraving work and had bought it 2 years ago with making 3-d objects in mind for $2000 but never got around to using it. I watched the posting and he went from $1500 to $1100. I researched the machine and it's retail price when set up as a CNC machine and looked at some work made with it ( by people who knew what they were doing ). Then I went to see him with cash and basically said I have cash in my pocket to buy today and it's 2 years old I'll buy it right now for this price or you can just sit on it longer.

I thought it would be a good investment. I figure at worse I can just sell it for a couple hundred more then I paid and at best I can use it for guards and 3-d textures on g-10 and micarta. Now lies the problem . It comes with MACH3 but as a person with no background in writing g-code or CAD I'm looking for a good place to start with tutorials and basics to actually run the thing. I know that since it's a mini mill the size of application will be limited but the cost and my thoughts about reselling if it's to much to handle played a part in the decision.

What is a good start point for studying and learning to write g-code or where to get small amounts of code written for me. Example a 1.5" x 4" piece of g-10 milled to have a "wavy " texture. I'm in a bit over my head at this point and broke my own rule about buying things I don't totally understand . How hard can it be and where's a good start point to learning to use CNC , write code or software to design that can be transferred to the machine . I know you probably get newbie posts like this all the time and I apologize in advance for that . But I'm totally lost and don't know where to start.

[noobCNC]

First you need a CAD program, which is for designing whatever it is that you want.

Then you want to get a CAM program, which transforms your designs into gcode.

Most people tend to find their niche software that works for them and stick with it. Myself I have a favorite CAD program and the CAM side Im exploring around still.

Cost is always the problem with those 2 software as they can get very expensive real fast for high performance software. But it doesnt hurt to try free stuff. Most CAM software offers time limited trials.

But there is a pretty good CAD and CAM software that is completely free and is pretty good for simple designs called HeeksCAD. Download it here: heekscad - Free CAD based on Open CASCADE - Google Project Hosting

This software allows you to design and spit out gcode for that design easily without you having to know g-code inside and out. Of course you should still roughly know what it means, but this is pretty noob-proof.