RE: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: VisualMill Free product

Thought I would give a little follow up on this free item. Even though I
am a licensed user of Visual Mill 4 after all the complaining that it
was crippleware and useless for anything I thought I would see for
myself. So I drew up a little flowing shape as a jewelry pendant in
Rhino and exported it as a .stl binary file. I then loaded it into the
Visual Mill Free product and it came in just fine. I did a horizontal
rough and then a finish operation on it and posted it using the AB1
post. Took the generated G-code, some machinable wax, fired up the
computer with Mach1 and put the wax on the Sherline mill. When it was
all set I hit run.

Guess what? The part came out perfectly.

So my feedback is that they are giving away a very useful piece of
software. No it does not do all that the for $$ version 4 program does
and for that I am thankful. I would have felt like an ass if I just
spent the money I did for something that was available free. But even
with the limitation the free program has it does a wonderful job and you
can cut real parts that would have been impossible on any other free CAM
program prior to this past Monday. If your crapware CAD program can not
put out .stl files that Visual Mill can open you may want to see if
using Accutrans 3D ( http://www.micromouse.ca/ ) will give you a usable
file. I have not tested the output form it into Visual Mill Free, but
from my use of it for other programs I would guess that is should work.

Tim
[Denver, CO]
Sherline products at Deep Discount(now Mach1 CNC controller too)
www.KTMarketing.com/Sherline