new and frustrated

[cowboy1ht]

ok so I'm new to cnc but not new to machining I have done a lot of manual machining its easy I got my part on paper put a piece of aluminum in my vise find the edge of the aluminum and I know were to go and what to do soooo I have always been looking at cnc watching videos on youtube and such and I think wow that's fast and can do a hole lot more then I can manually so I find a used cnc router ready to go to work yeah no such luck its been siting in my shop for month now it came with AutoCAD 2000 so I got all the books and have been learning AutoCAD and it came with kcam4 witch by the way sucks compared to mach3 no support really to speck of and to me hard to learn with no support sooo, I draw my part in AutoCAD go to kcam and don't know how to use it and it cant do 2.5d all its good for is to move my router around mach3 look way easer to use with a lot of tools to help you out but i see from reading a lot on mach3 everyone uses a different cam program so my question is cam software is there a better way to learn this a easer cam software to learn and that does at least 2.5d that don't cost 500.00 dollars as you all know from doing these I already got a lot of money in a machine siting in my shop

[Bubba]

cowboy,
It appears that kcam is a Controller like mach, turbocnc etc.
You are missing a step in between the cad process and the controller process and that is to generate the g-code from the drawing.
There are many ways of doing this from hand coding to having a computer generate it for you.
Cam programs run from free to many $$$$$
On the free side you can find Ace Converter (DAK Engineering - Home of TurboCNC)
or Cambam (CamBam CNC Software) and they also have a paid version.
My personal preference is Sheetcam (SheetCam homepage)

Good luck and welcome to an enjoyable experience.

[cowboy1ht]

it does convert my drawing in to g-code and i can save it as g-code from kcam theres a converter on the pc but it just converts you cant do anything with it or the drawing when i save my drawing in autocad as dxf and i go to kcam ond open that dxf it generates a g-code for the drawing

[cowboy1ht]

I guess is what I'm saying is I cant really fine tune it in between AutoCAD and kcam lets just say I'm I draw a 3 inch circle with a bolt pattern of 6, 1/4 inch holes when I go to kcam it thinks the bolt holes are circles and makes circles not holes with depth I have tried drawing them in autocad as 3d and it don't covert in 3d so I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if I'm missing a step or if I just got junk software or if I need more and easer to use software

[Bubba]

In the 2.5D world which most of us are in, you have to tell the cam program "how deep" to make the hole. For instance you have the 6-1/4" "circles" and now you tell the cam program to drill these holes 1" (or whatever) deep. When the cam program generates the g-code file, it will tell the controller, go to x,y and move the drill down Z.
You have to have a post (a file) that corresponds to the controller you have as not all g-code generated will be the same for different controllers.

Also as you have found out, most cams will not accept 3d drawings and most cams that I am aware of only accept .dxf files (not .dwg) and again most like an earlier flavor of dxf usually around rel 14.

[ger21]

Mach3 does come with LazyCAM, but it's never been fully finished (and won't be). My recommendation would be Vectric's Cut2D. You won't find anything easier to use. Download the demo and play around with it.
Also, from AutoCAD, always save as v12 .dxf
It's the most compatible format.