Hello all My name is Rik And I am from th UK east coast, Hull.

My wife says I'm having a mid life hell I'm only 37.
Anyway got the news going to be laid off in December, work at the same place for over 3 years now but chane is afoot so last in first out.

I have always wanted to machine mill and lathe I was a thin plate welder for a long while.
I had a bit of a car accident and this left me disabled can not lift very well, I managed to stick a steering wheel in my chest.

So moved into computers and networking its good but there is nothing to show for your work at the end of the day and I miss this.
So I have gone to college and enroled on a course to learn CNC machining Both CNC
I love the course so have nade the jump to buy a small lathe and milling machine.
I have not got them yet but every sat morning and sunday is now spent reading manuals etc to be able to at least have a go on the machines when we get them here.

So This will be a blogg of the ups and downs as I try to turn a hobby into a bussines from home to start and then just to see what goes.

I may well from time to time ask questions as I belive we need to pass on the knowlage or it will be lost.

So please bear with me  and point me true when I go a stray lol

Hi Rik,

Good fortune with your project.

You will get plenty of help, if you need it, from the members of this forum.

What sort of things are you considering making with CNC ?

Tweakie.

My aim is to do the small jobs and one off's. I will be working from home to start with.
I will start with small tank barrels for models etc and silencers and other tech bits for guns

What lathe and mill have you bought?
Hood

I have got a Denford starturn and starmill comming about 2 weeks.

Nice wee machines from what I hear, never  seen one in the flesh Are they retro fitted to Mach or do they still have the original control?
Hood

A very nice man from Cardiff is retro fitting them to run on windows XP that will have mach3 running on it.
In fact he has given one pc for each machine. The fun bit is the differance in the mach3 and the alphaCam we use at college. You did a translation not so long back for me to see the differance.

Well I have been talking to some people on here and CNC zone to see what is a good starting package to settle down with for CAD and CAM.
I am def staying with mach3 there is no way I would change that it's just finding the right software to go with it that I can afford and not have to ditch when I move onto bigger things (positive thinking here lol).
I have a student copy of alphaCam and also solidworks 2010  I bought a copy of solidcam2008 but the dam thing will not run on my laptop 64bit so a little cheesed off at that but well at leaset I know now.
So I need somthing in the hobby/ very small business price range so whats your thoughts on this?

Congratulations on your new equipment that is on the way.  Bet you are going to have a ball learning all the new stuff necessary to start cutting parts.

I have been using CamBam for the past couple of years.  It is a very nice CAD and CAM program.  You can download a full working copy from their site.  It can be run, to do a full job, I believe 40 times.  It will then revert back to only 500 lines of GCode until you purchase a registration code.  They have a great support group as well.  Very reasonably priced and you can communicate directly with the writer/developer directly on the forum.  His name is Andy and he goes by 10Bulls on the forum.

Here is the link to the forum, you can get to the download page from there as well.

http://www.cambam.co.uk/forum/index.php

Try it I think you may like it,
George

If you already have solidworks, and solidcam, I believe if it were me, I would just invest in a 32 bit OS.