Official Luthiers Forum!

Greetings from Brazil,

Thanks to OLF CNC forum I can ask questions and get answers. I am born again Luthier from USA, living here, with CNC homeade machine another Luthier friend ( Brazilian , one of my English students) built, but didn´t have time/patience to learn the controller software (Mach 3) due to no user manual translation...so he lent it to me to learn how to work it!!!

After months of lurking on CNC user forums and searching for best choice of cad/cam softwares to study ( he has been using Autocad for 15 years) he suggested using ArtCam for cam software...this after I have been studying a few others for the last couple of months!! I got Mach3 down pat and the cnc runs fine, but I have been lazy and don´t know Autocad yet.!!

Besides the youtube vid of APC Instruments Luthier doing his spiel for ArtCam on thier homepage, are there any of you users familier with it? Pros and cons? Love all the inputs and forum feedbacks from you Pros who really work everyday with your years of experience of CNC guitar making. I am more inclined to use the cnc to make molds and tools for acoustical lutheir works. The cnc owner had a factory here for ten years( Fox Guitars.com.br) before the Chinese cheap instrument invasion killed the factory. He made over 20,000 instruments oldschool with pin router. He is making more $ with repairs now and occational solidbody instruments which he still uses bandsaw/hand router...so I am trying to lean cnc to teach him how to work with CNC. More fun than I ever imagined!!

I don´t know if this is win/win or blind leading blind situation but since I found your forum I see some light at the end of tunnel!! God Bless America and thanks to the forum I too believe
``Yes, we can``.Ciao, Dennis, AxeTech Instruments,Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais,Brazil

Translates to Beautiful Horizonte, General Mines...16 tons, whad ya get..another day older and deeper in debt, St.Peter don´t call me ..cause I can´t go..gotta figure out how the CNC rolls.....

Welcome Starn,

I too use Mach software and though I do not use it much to build guitars (yet) I have used it to build one, and other than a hand router to radius the edges it is the only major power tool used to do any cutting on the guitar.

This guitar was designed in Rhino and parts were cut using the code from Madcam which is a cam plugin for Rhino. I could buy multiple seats of Rhino and Madcam for what one seat of Artcam would cost, but Artcam will do some things more easily than the R/M combo. Things like engraving photos, artwork, some sign making etc. As far as 2d and 3d cad, I don't think it will compete with Rhino. Madcam sits inside of Rhino for a seamless cad/cam solution. Both have free trials.

Mike

We have a copy of Artcam, Enroute, Aspire, Madcam, and Rhinocam/Visual Mill.

My two cents...... Artcam is more for 180 degree art''seee stuff. It will do instruments but that is not where it shines. For instance you can't run climb cut and normal cut on the same tool path it also offers limited toolpath strategies which is not a plus with difficult pieces. Aspire is a similar program but in my opinion dollar for dollar is a much better buy. Enroute is great if you are doing cabinets and you need to drop large amounts of data into the machine and have it nest parts on multi sheets with multi pieces........ but does a poor job.... again in my opinion with stl files. Enroute is capable of reading csv files and taking the layers and processing accordingly.

If you haven't gotten a cad package yet I would recommend Rhinoceros and if you go this route, Madcam and Rhinocam are great programs.... you probably need to try the demo's of both.....as with all programs each has it own quirks.

Another cad program you might want to look at is Alibre which can and does use Visual Mill .....(Rhimocam sister). This program is set to compete with Solidworks and can read and write a lot of file types including Rhino files.

Hope this helps,

Kevin Waldron