CAM/CAD/CNC

[walesguy1]

HI, new member been lurking for acouple of weeks
I have a limited engineering background in school then in collage then did a centre lathe government traing course (giving my age away) then i worked in a few factories on various machines lathes mills and grinding machines but that was 30 years ago
Recently got an old myford ml4 which needs some work so not started any projects yet but hope to by this weekend
form all the projects i have read on here i realise i will need a mill as well and have decided from reading i would like a cnc mill maybe not to start but one i can covert
I have looked at some of the vidieos and stuff
i quite like the idea of drawing a part making a 2d/3d image and the machineing it maybe 2d to start with
Not asking which products to use as have read many posts on here
was more conserned with the sequence of events from idea to part
cam/can/cnc what stages these programs cover as the list here is long can all these proceedures be done with one program or is this not possible due tothe cost of the softwear

hope this makes sense and please excusespelling never was any good at that

cheers brian

 

[DICKEYBIRD]

CAD will be the 1st thing to learn as it will be very useful for drawing up all your projects, regardless of when you want to dive into CNC. There are many free 2D CAD programs out there so there's no reason not to get started right away. You DO NOT have to sink a ton of money in software to get started!

I started with TurboCAD and have stuck with that for many, many years. There are free versions of it still available but if I were starting from scratch, I'd go with DraftSight which is very much like AutoCAD and there are good tutorials on YouTube and on this forum as well by "BigonSteam."

Once you are fluent in CAD, the CAM part will be much easier and there are free CAM programs as well. It'd be a great help if you can find someone nearby that could "hold your hand" and help you get started.

Good Luck!

 

[walesguy1]

thanks dickeybird will do as you say and have a look at those programs thanks brian

 

[kvom]

I have a CNC mill, but also a manual mill, and I'd find it a pain to do everything via CNC. I also break many times more tooling via CNC vs. manual, where I have some feel. If you decide to convert your first mill to CNC, plan on getting another one too.

 

[Tin Falcon]

the first step in automated design is cad (Computer aided design) two flavors 2D and 3D
3D will help you visualize but from most of what I have seen you only NEED 2D to feed into CAM .

TWO CAM computer aided manufacturing you feed a drawing into the program and tell the computer what to do with it it then generates some form of G -code that is fed into a cnc controller.
Another term I should mention is post processors. these are machine /software specific for each cnc controller. Customizes g code to match the needs of the controller program.


CNC Computer Numerical control controls the movement of machine tools .
You can program line by line. some cnc programs have conversational programing that will generate g code that the program will follow.

The price range for any of these programs is free or donation to thousands of dollars.

I do not know of any program that will do it all . some CAM programs will allow limited cad features. and some CNC will provide conversational programing that eliminates the CAD and CAM steps for simple operations.
there is lots of stuff out there you can download that is either free or try before you buy.
Hope this answers your questions.
Tin