Hello from Preston UK

[Danielspearuk]

Hi all, i am pretty rubbish with forums and I don't post very often as my questions are already pretty much covered.

(hope this isn't a bit too much of a life storey lol)
I did an apprenticeship (Milling on a bridgeport vmc heidenhain control) about 10 years ago and once I had served my time I changed career, my interest in CNC programming and machines has been eating away at me until I couldn't resist any longer.
A friend and I got a small home made cnc router off ebay and a hobby cnc 4aupc kit 2-3 years ago, we got mach3 and had it running (badly missing steps and inconsistent feed rates) on an old laptop -- it all got banished to the back of the garage till now.

My friend wants to produce his own pcbs and i just want to refresh my cnc skills so we dug it out and started reading about the issues we were having.

Having figured the laptop was a bad idea we got my old pc (p4 3gig 1.5 gig ram) set it up and it ran miles better but still skips steps at the extremes of the y axis probably due to the rails being out of parallel, this shouldn't be an issue as I still have enough area to work in. I know it wont be the most accurate machine but it should be good enough...... for now

As I said at the start of the post I have been out of this game 10 years now so have forgotten a lot and I was used to heidenhain not fanuc (did some fanuc at collage - but not enough obviously lol)

So at the moment I am just reading a lot of posts to try and refresh my memory.

Thanks for having me and I hope to have something worth contributing in the future

Danny

[Kipper]

So where's the pictures? Welcome

[Danielspearuk]

There ya go I am hoping to be able to use this to make another more robust and accurate machine once I've got it all calibrated/backlash set up.

[davidmb]

Are you ok generating the pcb isolation gcode?

Just asking because Eagle pcb cad software from CADSoft has a module/plugin that goes straight to gcode from the pcb design, and there's a free version that works upto 100mm x 80mm.

[Danielspearuk]

@davidmb
I've not got that far yet lol, I am still trying to remember how to do basic programs as 10 years out of the game has reduced my knowledge back down to first year appentice, it will come back lol, aswell as all that I didn't use fanuc so stuff I do remember I gotta figure it out in fanuc. it will probably be about 2 weeks before I am ready to play with pcbs.
I have played with some pcb software a few years ago but as the machine didn't run right I didn't get anywhere with it.

Cheers for the help

Danny