Three Piece Inlay - Took Way Too Long

Oct 19, 2008 22 Replies

No, I can't. Manuals for the ShopBot are available for public download - you can see what's available at

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- but I should warn you that ShopBot uses a proprietary programming language for their machines. Still, the ShopBot documentation is not a bad introduction.

The industry standard CNC programming language is commonly called G-code and a quick Google search on "g-code" produced some 740,000 hits, the first of which was a fairly good Wikipedia reference article.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - blame it on me. I like it for two reasons: [1] It does way more accurate work than I can, and [2] it provides a reasonable way for me to get boring production work done without /me/ having to do it all and without having to worry about some semi-skilled person cutting his/her fingers off.

It /is/ fun to play with - and if you're willing to build your own, you can probably do that for less than the cost of a Jessem router table, Mast-R-Lift, and a top-of-the line dovetail jig.

One source of stepper motors and controller cards is

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and you can find freely downloadable control software at
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- both can be seen on the web page at the link below.

Thanks Morris. I appreciate the help.

The drawings that I used to do in Inventor and AutoCad were run through another program (AlphaCam?) to produce G code.

I'd be happy to just learn enough to use the CNC at work.

tom watson

rbo.html- both can be seen on the web page at the link

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