So I've ordered a CNC upgrade package for my Taig manual mill, and it's due to arrive here early next week. BTW it's the Ethernet smooth stepper control box + motors setup from Jeff Birt at Soigeneris. So far I've installed Mach3 here on a clean XP box and have begun limited playing with, it in anticipation of my CNC rig.
Once I get things installed and myself oriented, the first thing I'm going to want to do is cut out a couple of straightforward 2D shapes from Delrin sheet. I already have these parts designed in my old old copy of Autocad, so it's trivial to export a DXF for each outline that I want to cut.
Mainly based on Jeff's recommendations, I'm planning on using just the combination of CamBam and Mach3 while I'm learning my way through the CNC workflow. In the immediate future I'll mainly be making 2.5D parts, perhaps delving into simple 3D features once I get a little farther along.
So here is one question I'm having already: I see that Mach3 itself has some capability to import DXF, so I begin to suspect that it may be feasible for me to get started initially without even CamBam. Is this a reasonable course to pursue for now? Or is importing DXF into Mach3 somehow severely limited, so that I should instead go ahead and get CamBam into the equation right from the start. At this point I know next to nothing about Mach3 or CamBam, though I've gotten to be quite good at manual machining so far. The parts I'm talking about are fairly simple; imagine something like a 2" diameter disc with a few simple shapes cut out from the center.
Thanks for any advice!
--dave