Here is mine so far, I'm having a ton of fun with QCAD.  Very intuitive.

With guidelines...
   

...and without.
   

Let me know what you guys think.

Sugs, looks like you are getting the hang of using QCAD very quickly!  Great!  Just realize that every white line will eventually be "cut".  In your design so far, that's going to make too much drop away.  Fortunately, QCAD has a tool that allows you to check this pretty easily - the "Hatch" tool.

First of all, make sure your guideline layer is hidden and your frame layer is chosen for editing.  Then, use a rectangle select to select everything (or just choose "Select All" from the Select menu).

Next choose the hatch tool (about half way down on the left side), then choose it again and say "OK" (I use solid fill).  What QCAD fills in is what your cut out part will be. (Then click anywhere on the drawing screen to deselect everything.) Here is what that sequence looks like on my design.


Then you can "Undo" to remove the fill.  (But keep going - you are doing great!)

Thanks sloscotty!

Yeah, I understand the cutout, and my design won't work as is for carbon fiber, but my question to you and my next thing to figure out was how to choose material thickness as I want to do this out of HDPE. Like my Fossilstuff Gravity frame, a large portion of the CNC milling will be recesses, from the middle of the frame to the motor wire channels and the motor locations themselves. I'm guessing I may have to start over with the design, but I was just following your tutorial to get familiar with the program.

(17-Jun-2018, 06:21 PM)Sugs Wrote: Thanks sloscotty!

Yeah, I understand the cutout, and my design won't work as is for carbon fiber, but my question to you and my next thing to figure out was how to choose material thickness as I want to do this out of HDPE.  Like my Fossilstuff Gravity frame, a large portion of the CNC milling will be recesses, from the middle of the frame to the motor wire channels and the motor locations themselves.  I'm guessing I may have to start over with the design, but I was just following your tutorial to get familiar with the program.

In that case, your design is probably fine, but it will depend on the CAM program you choose.  QCAD has a CAM add-on, but it's not free (it's actually pretty expensive and I haven't tried it).  I use Fusion360 for my CAM setups.  It has a much steeper learning curve than QCAD.  The CAM program is where you can specify depths of "pockets" (recesses) and so on.

(17-Jun-2018, 06:32 PM)sloscotty Wrote: In that case, your design is probably fine, but it will depend on the CAM program you choose.  QCAD has a CAM add-on, but it's not free (it's actually pretty expensive and I haven't tried it).  I use Fusion360 for my CAM setups.  It has a much steeper learning curve than QCAD.  The CAM program is where you can specify depths of "pockets" (recesses) and so on.

Ok, cool.  Well I checked and the price doesn't seem so bad, a touch over 100 bucks USD.  And it looks like you get the full professional version of QCAD along with it.

Your tutorial was great, but if I want to go further with this do you have a good place to check out for more instruction?

Thanks again!

There are a few QCAD/CAM tutorials on Youtube (and other places). You might also want to join the QCAD forum. Since I haven't used their CAM, I'm afraid I won't be much help. Not sure what I know in F360 will be much help with a program like QCAD/CAM. Good luck and keep us posted!

PS. Another CAM program I've heard a lot of good things about is ESTLCAM. You might check it out.