Weekend update - purchasing and software woes (and successes!)

I spent yesterday afternoon picking up a half dozen Baltic Birch 4x8s from Forest Products.  All good, easy transaction, in and out the door and on my way back home in less than 10 minutes.  I'd planned to spend the evening finishing up the CAD/CAM prep to maybe - just maybe try and CNC a panel this morning.  By 11:00 last night, I'd thrown up my hands in disgust.  I was starting to think that not only was I in over my head, I might be so far down the rabbit hole that the only way out was to back out and start over.  FreeCAD is a wonderful program, but it's got some idiosyncrasies that will drive you to drink.  Look up "Topological Naming Problem" for a glimpse.  There is however, a solution - but it does take pretty much starting fresh.  A branch copy of FreeCAD -that will probably get consumed back into the main product (it's that much better) not only fixes the naming issue, but injects a fair amount of common sense into some of the design elements as well. OK, I could go on for hours about how I stumbled thru the problems, learning the new branch, and watching a metric c___ton of youtube videos to make sense of things I encountered.  Short answer, there was beer involved.

At the end of the day though, I took this:

And turned it into this:

(it's a lot more fun to look at the layout than at the gcode that's really the output)

I greatly underestimated the 'beauty' of turning a 5x10 panel sketch into 4 pieces that could be swiveled around and fit on 3 sheets of plywood.  But it's done now, and tomorrow I'll switch to actually trying to cut the panel on the CNC - or I'll generate sixty bucks worth of sawdust - one of the two, I'm sure!!!

****************************