Hello,

     I originally posted this in the introductions until Dick was kind enough to let me know it needed to be out here. I'll just re-post the gist of it all

     My name is Bill Moll and I've been building guitars professionally for almost 45 years however, not using CNC, as many of my contemporaries do. I'm also a half-a$$ed hobby machinist and gunsmith which gives me a change of pace once in a while, but I enjoy doing that the old fashion way as well - at the lathe and mill. I've never had anything "against" using NC for either endeavor - except for the costs, and the learning curve. :-)

     Well, one of my gunsmithing projects has now turned into a product. Tolerances must be very, very tight however, so I have contracted with an outside CNC shop to produce some of the parts for me. I will engrave my own logo, model, and serial numbers though, and have bought a copy of Mach3 to see if I can get my stodgy old brain around all of this. The "tutorials" that came with my software - "getting started easy with Mach3", had nothing to do with learning how to use the program, only getting your steppers, ports, and boards configured correctly. (help)

     I understand that "Lazy-cam" will convert a .dxf file into G code but, all I have the ability to produce are .jpg's, .tiff's, .bmp's, etc. I've committed myself to learning this stuff thoroughly as time allows, but I need to get up to speed on the "simple" engraving work as soon as I can. Any, and all, help will be greatly appreciated.

     Thanks for being here - I now plan to do a lot of reading!

     Bill

Hi Bill,

Take a look at the free engraving program 'F-Engrave'  http://home.comcast.net/~sskroch/Fengrave/fengrave.html

This is quick and easy to learn and will produce the necessary GCode file ready to run from Mach3.

Tweakie.

Thanks Tweakie,

This looks like a good start.

Bill