I know there are some of you who use your tables for both. We have hopefully gotten the better part of figuring out plasma cutting down.
Now, we would like to do some routing. My question is basically on software. We have BobCad/Art, sheet cam, CorelDraw, and mach3. Now that I am figuring some of this out, I don't think we ever needed the BobCad/Art. But oh well. I haven't used the dxf file fixer software yet to go along with Corel but am working on it. What I have been doing is drawing in Corel, saving as bitmap. Import into BobArt, convert to vector, send to BobCad, do some final edits there, send to sheet cam, process and then into Mach 3. It seems like an idiotic process to have to go through, but I'm sure its just me learning to do things the hard way.
As I understand it, with the .dxf file exporter, I can export .dxf files from Corel straight into sheet cam?
At any rate, if I want to do some cutting into wood, I can accomplish that by using Corel and sheetcam correct? Sheet cam will generate my toolpath? I have been playing around with it and I think it will, but I want to make sure I am not skipping any steps. I tried a practice piece friday and everything went great until the machine drove the tool tip into the wood. I had manually zeroed Z on top of the piece, but obviously I missed something somewhere.
So, before I really screw things up, I want to cover my bases. Do I need Vcarve?
Oh, one more dumb question before I go....do I have to manually turn the router on, do I do it on the mach 3 screen, or what?