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Welcome aboard from another South Devon resident and occasional poster on the forum. Currently building my first loco having been a more-or-less model engineer for around 50 years... Not sure about North Devon but there are a few ME societies down this end of the county - I'm chairman of the...

One of the advantages of the UK house wiring system is that there is generally a "ring main" which daisy-chains all the sockets and back to the consumer unit (box with RCCDs/MCBs etc). The cable used (2.5sq mm) is nominally good for 20A, but fed via a 30A MCB. But then, in effect, each wall...

My CNC router is home-built although using fairly standard components. I have had one toroidal transformer fail, and several inductive proximity switches fail. However, I did buy a cheap box of switches from eBay when I built the machine. One was the wrong type (having two wires rather than...

These days, it's very likely that you will have 6 or more satellites in view at a time and modern GPS processors will combine position data from all these to give a better result. Each satellite, in effect, just allows you to measure how far you are from it so with one satellite you know the...

It's great to hear comments from a wide range of people here, but one thing to bear in mind is for whom you are producing the drawings. If I were in a professional drawing office, producing drawings to be used by someone in the factory that I shall never meet - or perhaps on the other side of...

As far as I know, VRML also treats the model as a series of flat planes, much like STL, so not really helping much. The millimetres/inches ambiguity isn't that unusual - I have been given DXF files to work with that were created in inches but which my CAD software treated as mm because DXF...

I' ve had a quick look back and can't find the file format used to transfer from the CAD programme to Deskproto for CAM. I saw a passing reference to STL but wasn't quite sure what that referred to. If the model is transferred via STL, though, then this explains the generation of G1...

I guess a lot depends on whether you can find the gears you want ready-made or plan to cut them - and if you can get the cutters off the shelf or have to make them... At that date, availability of ready-made gears might have been very different! Good luck, either way.

There's something a bit odd here, just looking at the basic dimensions the OP has given. Unfortunately, I can't get a clear image of the jpeg to check. Gear diameters are 1" and 1.3125". I'm not entirely sure if this is the actual gear OD, or the gear PCD. For simplicity, let's assume PCD...

Although I originally would have gone with the suggestion that it was an unseen artefact in the original CAD design, I have seen a similar effect in one of my own pieces of work. A few years ago I was asked to engrave a brass master for lost-wax casting some lapel badges for my local model...

Line count seems to depend a lot on things like stepover (pretty small with those cutters you are using!) but also on the cutting strategy used. Sometimes the CAM module seems to prefer a large number of straight line approximations when you might expect G2/G3 arcs - such as when you use one of...

Yep, PCI parallel port adapter can work. I gather that they can be a bit variable and may or may not work with Windows/Mach3 but it's a cheap enough thing to try. In fact, I did this quite a few years back with an old PC with no parallel port, although I was actually running LinuxCNC at that...

Mach3 has not been supported for quite a few years now. That doesn't mean that it suddenly stops working, of course, but as already said it will not run with W10. One reason is that newer PCs just do not have parallel ports (and again, as already said, USB to parallel "converters" mess up pulse...

Maybe not as funny but certainly true: "Pay a bit too little for a tool and you remember it every time you use it. Pay a bit too much for a tool and you forget it the first time you use it."

My CNC router is home-built but from welded steel tube, Hiwin profile rails, and ballscrews. It uses a water-cooled 3HP spindle. It can cut steel - but slowly, with shallow cuts, and as already mentioned the minimum spindle speed (according to the manufacturer 6K RPM but in practice due to lack...

While I use F360 and Solid Edge for "engineering" purposes - great 3D CAD tools - I also have and use a copy of Vectric Vcarve. I would characterise it as being mainly aimed at woodworkers and CNC routers, hence the "desktop" and "full" versions with a 4' or whatever cut-off! Not too many of our...

I have been using Fusion 360 extensively but now working with Solid Edge 2022 for design and modelling. I can confirm that you can export from SE in .stp format and import into F360 to use the CAM. A bit more clunky that having a properly integrated package (like F360 - just click a button to go...

For a given thread pitch and thread form (e.g. UN series, Whitworth form) the thread depth is always the same, whatever the diameter. So, a 1/2x32TPI thread has exactly the same thread depth as a 1/4x32TPI. If you can't find the tapping size drill for a given hole (because it's non-standard, for...

If you are ordering from Europe anyway, these guys are good for model-size (i.e. reduced head) items.

If you are using a nozzle height of .008", that would explain it. My usual layer height is 0.2mm, which is .008". That means that there is no "squish" on to the bed on the first layer which is essential for it to stick. Otherwise, as already said above, you just lay a bead of plastic on the bed...