Sketchup to Xilog Maestro

[Dominique Meuris]

We are producing solid Oak furniture on custom demand of our customers.
Bathroom, Kitchens, Television furniture, dining rooms, living rooms, ...
Currently we are with 20 workers, and we are looking into buying a cnc.
We are thinking of buying the SCM Z1 pro 31


At this moment we are doing all of our drawings with sketchup.
Now what i'm wondering about is it possible to load the sketchup drawing into the Xilog Maestro and then specify all the joints we would like to use?
dowell's, where to cut, where to drill holes, dovetails, ...
or what program would you suggest?
which is fairly easy to draw with + not to expensive. the cnc itself is already a huge investment for us.
Remember that everything is solid wood, so a cabinet drawing program is not of use to us.
It needs to be fast to draw the program, needs to be able to give a cutlist + transport to cnc with fast changes.


To have an idea of what we are doing.
www.Cocoon-interior.be

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

The biggest mistake people make when buying expensive machines like that is trying to use cheap software.
The software is the most important part of the process, and choosing the right software is the key to the machine being productive and making you money.

I'm not familiar with Xilog Maestro, but I doubt that it can do anything with your sketchup files.

Before buying the machine, I'd spend a lot of time researching software packages, and making sure that the software package will interface with the machine you'll be using. And if a salesman tells you it'll do something, make sure you get it in writing.
I've been working with machines like this and high end software packages for almost 20 years. I've seen very few salesmen that really know what they're selling.
Even better than having it in writing, have them give you demonstrations showing how it can be done.
Send your sketchup files to your salesman and ask him to tell you what software you need.

Don't be surprised if you need to spend $10,000-$15,000 on software.

One package that you might want to look into is Top Solid.

[Mike Heidrick]

Id call SCM but it will work with a dxf that can be generated in a number of ways. Id question my free sketchup and then using a converter - you will want to test that a lot. I am guessing you could make it work. With that class a machine it will be worth learning new software to gain features and efficiency.