Any Shapeoko owners in Portland, Oregon?

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

I really don’t understand your complaint, but would be glad to try to help you if you will allow it. If you would describe some task which you are having difficulty with, I will gladly try to work up a tutorial for it. There are a couple listed here: Shapeoko CNC Router, Rigid, Accurate, Reliable, and Affordable

In particular, I would hope that the Make a Coaster project is straight-forward enough for any novice to complete:

Let's make a coaster

The prototypical first job for a Shapeoko is to cut a coaster — here we do this using Carbide Create, trying to make the job as simple as possible, but adding a bit of interest with an inlay, and increasing the utility of the object by rounding off the corners. Before any real setup it will be best to go into Job Setup and Clear the drawing, and set the measurement units — please use mm (metric) for this tutorial. Note that the feeds and speeds in the Carbide 3D charts are given in Imperial inc…

If you’re having difficulties with drawing, this covers a basic aspect:

Let's draw an "ellipse" with new users

(the title of this post hearkens back to a small book / card which Warren Chappell created, “Let’s make a “B” for Bennet” — I was fortunate to meet Mr. Chappell when he was Artist-in-Residence at UVA on a school field trip when I was young, and he was the author, along with his cousin Oscar Ogg, of a number of books I remember from my youth.) Note that the below is obsoleted in current versions of Carbide Create by the ability to asymmetrically scale a circle into an oval/ellipse. Okay, step-b…

Unfortunately, Carbide Create’s curve tool is quite limited (off-path nodes must be in-line with the on-path node and equidistant) — anything complex would likely need to be drawn up in some other tool and then imported. If you could share a file which you are having difficulty with, we’d be glad to work with you, and I often fix files, and return them with explanations of what was done from support@carbide3d.com (and checking there I don’t see any unaddressed tickets).