Actually I have 10 seats of Mastercam X3 in our department so I should be fine in that respect. I was just thinking that it would be nice to have it at home to practice on when I'm not at the university. Do the AutoCAD drawings have to be wireframe or solid to import? With our Shopbot we do a lot of our stuff with simple 2D drawings and than import the dxf file to the Part Wizard program for setting up the tool paths.

I'll give them a call and see what I can find out about the demo, that would be helpful to me right now. Also, I've been doing a bit of searching on this forum and see that there are people who do a lot of their design in AutoCAD and than import it into MC. Since I am already comfortable with AutoCAD and I only want to do relatively simple 2D parts with no contours how practical of a solution would this be short term? I definitely want to learn the program, but I am also anxious to start cutting parts on our Tormach. If one was to go this route would you design solids, or simple 2D drawings?

Hello, this is my first post to the forum. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Technology at the University of North Dakota where I teach computer aided design and also an introductory manufacturing process class. We recently purchased a Tormach PCNC 1100 mill and duality lathe and I am starting to get my nose wet with MasterCAM X3. Though I have a strong background in AutoCAD and have also used some other CAM packages such as Part Wizard (we do have a ShopBot) I have had very minimal exposure to Mastercam and that was several years ago. I'm looking for suggestions that might help me get on board with this program in a relatively short time frame (I have the summer basically) I would really like to start using the program to help me cut out some simple 2D parts on the mill. So far I've been using the mill with the aide of the Part Wizard program, but I think the limitations of that approach are going to limit what I can and want to do. Any suggestions on tutorials, training, would be appreciated. I'm considering purchasing an educational license for my home so that I can spend additional time on the program away from my office. Regards, Alex Johnson