I am an absolute newbie to the plasma cutting and the programs available. Where do I start? I purchased the table and it will be a few months before delivery. I have downloaded fusion 360, Sheetcam, and Inkskape. I don’t know how to use any of them. Anyone willing to help?
Welcome! You can start by going to the Langmuir site and under support there are some videos on getting started in Fusion CAD/CAM. They are a little off date but will help. At the bottom past the videos are some more instructions on how to install the Post Processor for Fusion. I do not use Sheetcam or Inkskape but many on the forum do and they will help you. This is what the Forum is about. At the top you can search for different things that you may have other questions about. Good luck! We are here to help when we can!
I use Inkscape and Fusion. Mainly Fusion as I feel my time is better spent there for the long run. Never know where this hobby will take me and I don’t really do artwork. With that said, knowing how to use the basics of Inkscape has definately come in handy countless times for me. You are just going to have to start somewhere and it likely doesn’t really matter where. You might decide that solidworks for ex. is what fits you best, or maybe not. Won’t know without trying. I tried Fusion, Solidworks, Sheetcam, and Inkscape. I now just lay my parts out in Fushion and then they are set. However, if I was doing a lot of one off parts, I just cut the same parts over and over again, where I needed to nest on a regular basis, i’d use sheetcam more. Fusion now has nesting but I havn’te experimented with it. Watching youtube videos and messing around in Fusion has been how i’ve learned. I set out with an idea and would start playing around with it. To start, for awhile, I would end up scraping the project before I started to get the hang of doing what I want Fusion to do for me. Has taken a lot of patience and time but I feel I’m better overall for all of it. Good luck. The rabbit hole is deep.
Ok so what i did and this doesn’t work for everybody, is i painstakingly went thru the video’s for fusion 360 and watched them over and over but when i tried my hand at design i started with something simple like just a box. Then I played with some of the tooling like fillet’s , rounding out the corner’s. Just play with it. Yes you will make mistakes and who doesn’t? Push the button’s and see what they do, the more you play the more you will remember, AND if you need help everybody is pretty good about answering any questions you might have. That is how i have learned and i am sure you can too. Doug
I agree with this 100%…!! Just let your mind wander and learn as you play around… Alot more will stick with you if the lessons you learn come from things that mean something to you… Maybe design a logo or something to hold some tools? Something that you’d like to be your first project!!
Good luck and have fun with it!!