What are the most common/popular CAD/CAM programs that you use?

galipeau

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Looking for any experience you may have worth different design programs.

Thanks, Ian
 

conetip

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
AutoDesk Autocad people their online Fusion360 with HSMworks. It is free for business less than 100k per anum. Takes a bit of learning if you have used Solid works , but it is free and works really well. My son learnt in 1 week how to model a propeller and then posted the code to our mill to cut each side of the carbon props. The presets in HSMworks work very well for a variety of materials. It does take some time to get a tool library of the actual tools you have, but is really worth doing. I have not done any cue work on my mill, but have made piston blanks and other parts for my model planes.
It posts the code for Mach3 no problems at all.
Neil
 

Mc2

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I prefer Bobcad. Just git ver 28 with training dvds. For the price it does most of what most will need and more. I think I have some coupons her somewhere for $500 off. Not sure how that helps as the price is flexible.
 

Texas Carom Club

9ball did to billiards what hiphop did to america
Silver Member
i used mastercam for along time, thought it was the beez till i used featurecam and oooh boy im never looking back,
so user friendly

used both for over 5 yrs each now, featurecam is they way to go for me
 

john coloccia

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
rhino is a good cheap one as well

I have Rhino and madCam. I very much like Rhino for guitar work, because it's really quite adept at working with all sorts of organic shapes. It would be very cool for inlay work. It's also easy to program and make custom scripts for automating tasks. That said, it forces you to think about your models differently, starting with very simple lines and shapes and then using the various commands to flesh out the surfaces. You'll quickly learn how advantageous it is to think about a cone, for example, as a slanted straight line rotated about an axis as opposed to using a cone primitive.

Go to www.infiniteskills.com. Get a monthly subscription. It's cheap. You can cancel it and reactivate it when you need it again. They have tutorials for AutoCad, Solidworks, Sketchup, and Rhino, plus they have LOTS of other tutorials on practically any software you could want. I can tell you that the Rhino tutorials are top notch. I went from zero to quite competent in just a couple of weeks. Ditto for the tutorials I've done for Photoshop, Premiere...probably some others. Oh, web design...lots of great stuff out there.
 
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Texas Carom Club

9ball did to billiards what hiphop did to america
Silver Member
i messed around with rhino before finding my number 1 favorite cad tool for organic shapes

zbrush!
 
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