(William R. Watt) wrote in
:

Greg Carlson sells a CNC cutter and his free plywood boat design
program is meant to work with it. The CNC output which I don't
understand might be an industry standard. Take a look at
www.carlsondesign.com. The program is limited in the hull shapes it
can handle - hard chined with only 5 stations if I remember correctly.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
------- William R Watt National Capital FreeNet Ottawa's free
community network homepage: www.ncf.ca/~ag384/top.htm
warning: non-FreeNet email must have "notspam" in subject or it's
returned


Go to www.cnczone.com and have a look at the home built wooden router
forum. People there (including me) are building/have built all sorts of
home built cnc machines. The CAM has definitely caught up with the CAD,
you just need to know where to look. As to CAD, Rhino produces 3D surface
models, you cannot go direct from there to develop and cut the composite
2d parts. Once you get the idea of 2d, 2 1/2 d and 3d machining then its
all possible and there's even freeware/shareware to drive a machine,
interpret cad output to gcode and the like.

My 2'x4'x14" machine has a 3 1/2 hp Portercable router and can cut wood
or Aluminum, cut up to 120inches pm, can cut 3d direct from rhino, 2 or 2
1/2 d from Autocad or drill circuit boards to 0.001" with #80 drills. All
up costs excluding router was about $900.