Gone 'n' dunnit!

[John Candy]

After a few years of dithering, have ordered a 3D printer, in fact a Snapmaker 2.0 A350, which also can laser cut wood and plastics and CNC mill wood, plastic and aluminium.

The laser and milling functions will cut from common image file formats (JPG, PNG, etc.) as well as CAD files .... just as well since I have no CAD skills.
It will be able to work from images I previously prepared for the Cricut Maker (a heavy duty die cutter).

The 3D printing bit is still a total blank so far as my capabilities are concerned but that will now need to be mastered.

The plan is that the combination of the three functions will produce panelled carriages and horse boxes (principally GNR/GCR/LNER and LNWR/MR/LMS stock).

There are plenty of videos about using the Snapmaker on YouTube but has anybody here used a Snapmaker?

Regards,
John.

[cabbage]

John,
Examine the Wiki on Cura, LibreCAD, OpenSCAD and Laser Web. Have a play with some of the SCAD scripts. Hopefully I have made them easy to read and understand.

I hope you enjoy being as lazy and cheapskate as I am!!!

Regards

Ralph

[IanT]

It looks to be an interesting machine John.

I've had a 3D Printer (Sovol S01) for just over a year and have found it very useful for some things (all workshop related thus far). Ralph recommended Open SCAD for simple objects and I would agree with him that SCAD provides a low-effort route to designing for 3DP. I've used it for simple things and also downloaded useful objects from Thingiverse that can be 'adapted'.

For larger/more complex, especially multi-part objects, a good, modern 3D CAD system is required and I've been transitioning from TurboCAD 2D to Solid Edge 2020 since last year - partly prompted by now having the Sovol. I can highly recommend SE 2020 (Community Edition) as being both functional and very powerful. It's fully parametric and uses both ordered and synchronous design methods (hard to simply explain but it does make life easier). It's fully parametric and can generate dimensioned 2D drawings from 3D parts very simply. More importantly perhaps, it's also a free lifetime license (and is not Cloud based like Fusion).

I have thought about buying a small CNC machine but I do have a finite limit on the new things I can absorb within a given period and I've quite enough with 3DP and 3D CAD at the moment.

I will be very interested to hear how your machine handles the CNC side however.

Regards,

IanT