On Friday, February 27, 2015 at 12:21:51 AM UTC-8, robobass wrote:
If you are going to cut metals I would strongly suggest getting another machine to do it that's more rigid. Something like this perhaps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nev98v3PyXk

That tool changer would be sweet. Otherwise I'm getting perfectly good results cutting brass now that I've worked out most of the kinks. And, the big XY plane means I can do lots of stuff I couldn't do on a normal knee mill.

Thanks for the tip on Al. I paid 1k for the Cad/Cam + BobArt. Not bad, but I paid another $400 for two hours of rather lame online training. Anyway, I'm now able to do everything I need, and some of my parts are rather complicated.

Don't be so quick to discount knee mills with a sliding ram. They can be very versatile when you need to do large plates/parts.

Al's specialty is 3 axis surfacing toolpath. Many CADCAM systems use the ModuleWorks toolpath engine. Al knows the ModuleWorks toolpath engine very well as he's spent many years supporting it:

http://www.moduleworks.com/company/partners/