Hello everyone, I am Michial, from the Dallas, TX area.  Thought I would introduce myself.  I am learning machining, been working on teaching myself with a manual setup for the past 3 years, and seriously able to produce things of any complexity for the past year, so overall I am a newbie to machining as much as I am to CNC.

I've spent the past year day dreaming and wanting to convert my Smithy Granite iMax 1340 to CNC.  Finally I started the conversion a couple of weeks ago, and as of about an hour ago I was finally able to move my X/Y Axis, and most likely sometime tomorrow I will have the Z-Axis working too.

Anyway, at this point I feel like the Dog that just caught the tail he has been chasing for the past year, now I am wondering what next?  Needless to say I didn't exactly spend a lot of time learning what was coming next, so I am really left with the what next question in my head.

Is there a step by step document that is dumbed down to newbie level that walks through the initial machine setup, starting with the basics like getting the steppers moving in the right direction, making sure that mach3 and the steppers are in sync so that it when mach3 thinks it's moving .001" it is actually moving .001 etc???  Kind of a check list of things that need done before you can run your first program?

I done the same thing several years ago. The most important
thing that helped me was the Mach 3 manual. I read it so many
times it was unreal. The manual has great stuff in it.
When I got really confused I would search here on the forum
and if I did not find the answer I would post the question.
Very helpful people here. I'm no expert by any
stretch but I can stumble my way thru and each
stumble I learn something that helps me next time.

That's my story, hope I / we can help you grow.

olf20 / Bob

I am reading through the manual again now.  I am still getting confused on some of it, but it is getting a little clearer.  I still have quite a few things to install on the machine too, but it's coming along.

Here is a link to different manuals. There is one for setup that will be helpfull.

http://www.machsupport.com/help-learning/product-manuals/

The click the MAch3 tab

Here is a link to the install / setup manual:

http://www.machsupport.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Mach3Mill_Install_Config.pdf
RICH