I consider myself to be a middle of the road WW'er with a pretty complete shop. Always looking for a new challenge I purchased a CarveWright machine primarily to make ornamental designs on box lids and signs. So far I've been able to figure out what I needed to do but am looking for more software images and hardware to continue to grow. To that end I've seeming run into the proprietary hardware (bits) and software image costs imposed by CarveWright.

1. Rocker is running a sale on Freund signmaking bits with 1/4 and 1/2 inch shanks. These are priced about 1/2 the cost of the proprietary bits. However, CarveWright warns against using other manufacturers. Does anyone know why and have they tried other bits?

2. The same kind of question relates to software graphics. To purchase graphics from CarveWright is very expensive. Are there other libraries out there that I can download images from that are free or lower cost?