A newbie joins the forum - London England

[Pete Wood]

I wanted to say hello, as I have just joined this forum.

I am looking for plans to build a good table and CNC router and found you via a search engine.

It appears I have joined at an opportune moment, as Gerald appears to be about ready to release his plans....?

I am a Design & Technology teacher, based in London, England. I teach my pupils (11-16 years old) ArtCAM. The school can't afford the equipment, so I intend to build one (and have to pay for all the parts from my own pocket).

Without being, or sounding (I hope) pushy, when are the plans likely to be released please?

I am sorry to say that I doubt very much that I will be able to contribute much (if anything!), but I will be an avid lurker who will follow everyone's advice without question.

Thanks for letting me be a part of this great adventure.

[Mike John]

Pete
Welcome.
You can contribute greatly by asking questions.
Often the answers help us all!

............Mike

[Gerald_D]

Hi Pete, Welcome!

I am going on a 3-week holiday on Friday and things should only pick up speed after then. At the moment I'm trying to get a decent framework of drawing numbers and formats together. Later today, some more links will appear on the trial downloads page (http://www.mechmate.com/downloads.html) so that I can see if the folk with folio paper can actually download the stuff.

Curious to hear what type of search found this site for you? A reason for putting this site up before the plans are ready, was so that the search engines could start their indexing - at least that seems to have worked! http://www.mechmate.com/Forum/clipart/happy.gif

[Pete Wood]

Thank you both for the warm welcome.

I found this forum via Google using the search term "Build your own CNC Router".

What then drew me here, after reading through a few of the other sites, was the fact that your site mentions European voltages.

I am hoping that this means your table measurements will be in metric....??

Have a relaxing holiday. In the meantime, I will download some of the trial pages. Thank you so much for inviting me (and others) to try them out.

[David Rosenbleeth]

Gerald: a quick test of one of each resulted in no difficulty downloading either the xls, dxf, or pdf type files on my end.

Dave

[Gerald_D]

Dave, at the top of the downloads page there is a link to a .zip that contains everything to date.

[Paul A]

Hi Gerald
I managed to download the Mechmate building files OK.

All I can say is they are Brilliant, you have spent a lot of hours designing and drawing. I am sure that it will inspire many budding builders that have held back because of the lack of information to build a large CNC router.

I was unable to open the files with Autocad 14 and had to use Autocad 2006... Do you think that an older version of DWG/DXF files would help builders that cannot open the latest versions.


Once again Congratulations


Regards

Paul

[Gerald_D]

Hi Paul

The drawing files are all AutoCAD2000 format. If I go to a lower dxf version then I lose the text formatting.

Anyone else feel that the dxf version has been set too high?

[Kim Mortensen]

You can always download a DXF viewer freely from autocads homepage.. Or you can use turbocad or a multitude of other cad programs to open the files with.