On Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 12:21:24 PM UTC-8, robobass wrote:
On Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 4:09:00 PM UTC+1, jon_banquer wrote:
On Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 2:28:45 AM UTC-8, robobass wrote:
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.

I did have a Boss3 for many years. What I have now fits my needs for my current situation very well. Here in Germany, a big knee mill is much more expensive than in North America, new or used. Also, all big industrial machinery here runs on 380-400v only, and I have to make do with a single 3.8KW 220v circuit for the whole shop. Riggers charge more too. A knee mill just isn't in the cards for me.

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:

I just watched a few of his videos. Very helpful!


Glad to hear this!

It can takes a lot of effort to master surfacing toolpath because their parameters are often changed as developers improve them.

I create surfacing toolpath everyday and I still run into situations that I struggle with.

For me the surfacing itself isn't what's creating headaches, it's setting boundaries where I get hung up. And that goes for for some 2D profiling jobs as well!


BobCRAP makes very poor use of the information a model contains so you often have to extract or create wireframe for your boundaries so you can cut what you want. Even in better CADCAM products, the need for creating boundaries is still there. As time goes on, and CADCAM products finally start to make better use of the information a model contains, the need for creating boundaries will be drastically reduced. In better CADCAM this is happening now and it's only going to get better:

Here are two videos that illustrate my point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRDILRT3jx8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyyn6h_b-oY