I really WANT to use Fusion 360. I have been really giving it a fresh look and honestly applying myself toward making it work. It has been no small feat. It took me a little time to accept that they lost my early adopter status and were not interested in helping get it back. And frankly, it is a huge leap of faith for me to even accept having my data on their cloud. I had even reconciled paying them for Probing and 4th axis capability despite already owning software that gives me that. But this latest trouble is really testing my limits. How does ANYONE justify calling their software 4 and 5 axis when it CLEARLY is NOT? It is only now getting to the point of halfarsed hacks to get some minor modicum of 4th axis toolpath. And what DOES exist is pathetic, at best. People that have been following our feed, or discuss things on various forums, or know me in real life know that I am very familiar with most CADCAM out there, and fluent in much of it. From Delcam PowerMILL to Siemens NX to BobCadCam to Esprit to Gibbs to you name it. BobCadCam does an INFINITELY more capable job at it than Fusion 360. I have some parts to make that I struggled with for hours and hours. After speaking with Five different people, every single one told me that they could not in good conscience advise me to continue pursuing this in Fusion 360 if I really had to do this in real life and needed to make money. And three of them are affiliated with AutoDesk! Seriously? As an experiment, I called a colleague and asked if I could use their PowerMILL. I have almost a decade of experience programming in PowerMILL. We are actually friends and do favors for each other all the time, so he of course agreed. I drove over and sat down in front of his workstation. Seven minutes. From clicking the program icon to posting GOOD, WORKING code. It took me Seven minutes. What the heck, AutoDesk? After all of that, why should anyone be expected to pay for 4axis software that isn't actually 4th axis software? I think that this is a fair question that deserves an honest and forthright answer. #disappointed #fusionisstillatoy #dontcallit4thaxis #itisntturning #notreadyforprimetime (at American Machine & Gear Works)
