Yeah! Great looking cars, Anthony! Those fenders look light!
Ok... Doug is right in one respect... as far as CNC is concerned it really comes down to the drawings. You have to be able to create a decent drawing of you want anything to happen with the machine.
My favorite 2D drawing program is AutoCAD and it is free for students, so you might be able to get a copy using your child’s school ID.
Adobe Illustrator works fine too... and there are a host of other vector based programs out there that can get the job done... I think Corel Draw is a free one too.
Let me know which way you want to go with it. I highly recommend Rhino which has a 90 day trial on their product and very reasonable pricing (especially with a school ID). I’m thinking about offering an online Rhino class for fellas but unsure of how often to run it and cost etc.... but I can probably get you up and running in the 2D aspect pretty quickly.
As far as CNC goes... $500 is really the bottom of the barrel for choices and I would consider investing a little more if at all possible.
Shape ok I was mentioned here but is out of your price range... I also don’t like that it uses belts instead of ball screws or other means... but for PWD it would probably get you what you need. I can look into it further if your price range has some flexibility.
I think Andre is using a Sainsmart CNC... a buddy of mine sent me one to test out and the scale seems good for CNC but I haven’t gotten around to really putting it through its paces. They run about $350 I think. It feels like a toy to me and I can’t imagine that it can maintain too much precision... but maybe with a lot of TLC it can probably do some PWD stuff just fine. Pinewood CNC was using and recommending a Chinese 1040 (can’t remember the exact numbers) check out his website and I think he has a link to it and that one is about $300 as well if I recall.
It is a common phrase in CNC forums to buy your second machine first... and I totally agree. With a larger machine you will find many uses for it beyond PWD. Just my two cents.
