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

Took a video of the soft jaw being machined today. I increased the feedrate to 1000mm/min which dropped the time down to about 8mins. My spindle is 3800rpm max but hopefully I can either adapt it to get 6000rpm plus or find another faster motor. If I could get the rpm I could feed at at least twice the current feedrate. I had inadvertantly set a slow Z feedrate for the finishing passes, that wastes a lot of time as well.
Anyway here is the vid, 3800rpm, 5mm DOC and 10% step over and material was just mild steel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOZqJWJ_P0Y

Hood

Excellent work Hood - that tool-changer certainly is slick.

Tweakie.

Yes, toolchanger is great, especially now I have got rid of all the external and valve air leaks. When I fist got it the  arms would fall down maybe 15 seconds after I removed the air, I improved that with new pipes and a couple of new valves and it was over 1 minute but the manifold was leaking internally. I have now totally replaced all valves and the manifold with some smc valves and manifolds I got on eBay and now its over 4mins before the arms will fall after air is removed. The leaking now seems to be internal in the cylinders so I think I will just have to live with that.
Hood

It seems like BobCAD is finally working on shedding the horrendous reputation they had gotten over the years. Unfortunately for them, that reputation is so bad that a very large number of people will never consider or recommend them.
What they really need top do is come up with a fixed pricing model for everyone. It's pretty bad when the cost of a package on their website is ~$5000, and I know people have gotten the same package for anywhere from $500-$1000. Until that happens, they won't be taken seriously by a lot of people.

That practice goes on with everything that is sold  but at least you know if you can haggle you may get a decent deal.
 Just think of going to buy a car, go to the showroom and theres the price, do you pay that price? I certainly wouldnt and I dont know anyone who has.
It also seems to be the way of most CAM packages as well with the difference being most dont even show you the list price so you dont know where you are starting from.

It pi$$es me off  that every single day that I have to work hard to get the best price I can for everything from buying stainless or Alu or bearings or  whatever and even then I am never sure if I could have got a better price. It just seems that is the way the world works now, maybe always has but it was more covert before.

Regarding BobCAD itself, it certainly seems to have come on leaps and bounds in the last rev or two, I looked at it maybe 5 years ago for the lathe and it wasnt that great, couldnt work out how to do things and all I got back from BobCAD was a video showing my part done, but no explanation as to how they got there, so I gave it a miss.

I would say Al has done a lot to get the image of BobCAD cleaned up and if it wasnt for him I dont think I would even have been looking at it again.
 

Hood

Glad BobCad is satisfying your need Hood.

I am one of those guys that still have the bad image in my head. Tried it back at 15 to 17 version ....gave it back to guys at work work and asked them why they were not using it........ they didn't have a nice reply.

Over time it does seem to have improved a lot.
Keep posting as I'll keep a watch on what it's doing for you.

RICH

Rich its certainly doing a good job so far
I was of the same opinion as you a few years back, well certainly from my messing with the lathe side of it. The sales calls were also a pain but caller ID is a wonderful thing although I have heard they are not so bad now but as I never answer International calls I dont know if I have had many from BobCAD.
Still dont use the CAD side apart from modifications for toolpaths but that is mostly because I was used to the SolidWorks style of modelling, which Cubify does, so I do my models in it and import to BobCAD.
The CAD side of BobCAD is quite powerful once you get into the way of how it works but its still not for me.
Hood