Sheet cam or fusion 360

Yep. Pretty much me too. But for those who are also in the “can’t beat free” camp Fusion is a reasonable tool for the full workflow.

There are a few other CAD tools that are free that folks have been talking about recently (DesignSpark Mechanical, Solid Edge) that might be worth looking into.

Fusion’s sheetmetal tooling is really hard to beat with its ability to automatically apply the K factors, calculate radius, etc when it flattens a design if you need that kind of thing.

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I’m new to the CNC world. We recently acquired a Crossfire with the XL add on. We have been really busy so I haven’t had time to get everything set up but I’ve been looking at software and watching videos. I have worked with Autocad for years and have a subscription to keep my software current so I’m very comfortable doing my design work with Autocad. I downloaded Fusion360 and spent some time trying to get familiar with it then Autodesk announced that they were crippling the free version. So, I don’t need it to design. I’m looking at SheetCAM for creating the tool paths and G-Code. We plan on getting a CNC Router in the future and from what I can tell we could use it with it also. Am I going in the right direction?

I am proficient in autocard but did not like fusion as there were similarities but enough differences that it got confusing .
Found I am truly enjoying inkscape as you can do more than just design…

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I would like to know what’s the last version of adobe illustrator they sold on dvd. I would like to have a copy of it for sure. Any ideas. I am looking for a Mac version.

I’m believe they last offered a one time purchase in 2013. But I’m willing to bet it may not be supported by the current macOS.

Why not just rage against the Adobe behemoth and go to Affinity Designer? I love affinity and it runs incredible on Mac.

What kind of work do you do with Affinity Designer?

I do everything with it. I use it to design art stuff and vector graphics but have also learned how to use it for accurate technical drawings. The downside is no .dxf export, but the .svg s I export work perfect in sheet cam. I’ve also found a way to convert them to .dxf thanks to @TomWS

So not really like fusion where you can type in the measurements?
That’s basically all I ever do except the odd sign or whatever that I get asked to do.
I like fusion for all the geometry features and the circle and rectangle pattern, mirror, and the constraints.
It makes really short work of the things I design by being able to use those features and just type in the measurements and angles.

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Right, you can’t type in measurements. But, when you set up the document with a grid and snapping, you can quickly draw shapes and lines and it tells you the measurements as you drag. So I set my grid up for 1/8 inch increments. There are tons of shapes to chose from, you can lock aspects of it like constraints in fusion, and you can choose points of rotation as well. The more I tried to design technical stuff the more I learned about the program and how useful it is. Fusion absolutely serves a purpose, but for 2d stuff, Im pretty sure I can do anything fusion can do.

Are you saying use Affinity Designer to draw/design then Sheet-Cam to post to

That’s what I do

would drawing and designing in Corel Draw work, save it as an SVG and then import it into Sheet - Cam? most if not all of my stuff is in Corel considering I use Laser Engravers as well.

from my understanding as long as it is an svg file…sheetcam will open it and create the g-code for cutting.

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Yes. That’s what I do for 2D work. I also have a laser and often do tests of designs using the laser before running it on steel with the Crossfire. I also upscale designs I’ve done in wood for the larger bed capacity of the Crossfire.

If you do that, remember the kerf on the plasma is about 10x bigger than the laser so you may lose detail or end up with very thin or sharp parts. Changing the line thickness in Corel to something like .06" will show you where you might have issues cutting it with the plasma.

Fantastic! That all makes sense as well. I tried cutting a part last night with Fusion and that looked like a 2 year old with a crayon. That program is confusing as heck.

It’s overkill for most of what we do. It’s great for a lot of 3D modeling but there are other good apps for that now and some like Freecad really are free for hobbyists who make some side dollars.

that is why some of us refer to it as “conFusion”…or at least I call it that

Are you able to use AutoCad text to cut out? I haven’t been able to figure that out. For the most part I do prefer AutoCad cause that is what I know best.

any test I do I do in inscape…easy to work with fonts…and the SVG file runs much better on the table.
I use autoCad for fabrication parts.

You need to turn the text to paths. It may be a right-click and “expand” but it’s been a long time since I touched AutoCad.