I have been using BobCAD for quite a while now and I am liking it a lot.
V26 made a huge leap forward for lathes especially although there were also a lot of additions for milling. Lathe still has a couple of niggles and hopefully they will be sorted soon but overall it is working very well.
One thing I managed to do the last week was to make default profiles with all common operations, this will be especially handy for lathe work. I can load a profile that has turning, both OD and ID, Grooving, parting, Threading OD and ID. I have all these operations disabled for posting as default. What I do is open the default profile then go to File menu and click Merge, that allows me to browse and open a 3D model (I prefer to use Cubify for my models as I am used to that style of working), once opened I can then select any of the operations and choose a Geometry from the part and then compute the toolpath. It makes things very quick as I have my most common tools and their feeds and speeds already set for each operation and if I need to change anything it is just a matter of going in and changing what I want. This saves a lot of time as I dont have to go through each step if it is not required.
I have mainly been using BobCAD for lathe work but I have done some milling as well. I did some soft jaws for a Forkardt chuck I have, I used conventional toolpaths at first but then decided to try the adaptive tool path and it worked very well. I was a bit of a coward as I should really have been feeding at 1000mm/min or so but I decided just to set it to 600mm/min but even that made each jaw only 14mins as compared to the previous 25mins of the conventional toolpath, also the adaptive type toolpath seems much friendlier on the tooling.
Below is a few pics of the simulation of the soft jaws, showing the type of toolpath and also a pic of the default lathe profile so you can maybe get an idea of what I was meaning.
Hood