It does seem to dance about a bit and I think this is one problem why CNC gets so much bad press in the mag.

There has now been about 5 or 6 major articles on CNC but not one has worked logically.

By logically imagine you are now the proud owner of a Widget CNC mill, all singing, all dancing in it's coat of metallichrome turd brown.

You have bought a couple of cutters, a collet or collet chuck but what do you do with it. ??

There are three area's you have to learn. One is to draw the part, second is to bring that into a CAM package that will convert the drawing to G Code and lastly you have to tell the machine how to use this code.

That's it – everything else is just experience on these 3 modules.

However all the articles I have seen either get sidetracked or start off like you are fully experienced anyway.

[edited] because the Welsh version of my keyboard only has 21 letters and 5 of these are L's and 7 are F's

Edited By John Stevenson on 29/09/2013 13:34:20

trouble is, if you write a simple article you get accused of being patronising, get a little more adventurous and your also accused of not taking the beginner into consideration and there's always someone ready to pounce on the smallest mistake, which is the main reason I stopped writing them several years ago, and now only skirt around the periphery of the subject, leaving sticking the head above the parapet for other souls brave enough to tackle the subject.

I feel the only way to learn CNC is one to one in the workshop, which unfortunately is not always possible.