If I were in your shoes, I’d start on this page: Carbide Create Video Tutorial Series to get the skills downpat with Carbide Create (CC). Fusion 360 is awesome but my suggestion would be to get comfortable with the process of creating a design, setting up your material, then cutting it before moving to other software like fusion.
The tutorials videos will have more detail around achieving what you want, but the basic process for me is as follows (this isn’t a CC tutorial, just a workflow guide)
- Select appropriate material for what you want to make. Measure Length, Width and Thickness.
- Set these dimensions in CC, and design your job. CC allows import of SVGs (Bit of good info on this here), but for your first few jobs I’d suggest just doing a sign using the text tool in CC.
- Create your toolpaths in CC to match the endmills you’ve got - double triple check all your zero points and tooling, safe Z heights… getting these wrong catches pretty much everyone out at some stage. if you plan to use your Z probe ensure your Z is set to the top of the material, not the bottom.
- clamp or screw your material down to your wasteboard, square and flat
- when your toolpaths are created in CC, save them as Gcode (usually a .nc file)
- open CNCjs, home your machine, then set the X & Y zero as the same place you did in CC (e.g center of material, bottom left… neither is better, just ensure you match what you selected in CC)
- to set the Z zero, use the macro that Mr Beaver supplied with the Probe, or for your first few you can put a piece of paper between your endmill and the material and lower your Z axis in 0.1mm increments until the paper cannot slide between the two. (I use this process on almost all timber jobs I do)
- in CNCJS, open your file, and jog the machine around with the viewpoint from the top, and check that the toolpaths don’t hit any screws or clamps, and are within your material area
- if it looks good, load the correct endmill, start your router and press start in CNCjs. If it’s the first time I’ve run a Gcode/job then I keep my hand close to the power switch / E-stop for the first minute or so, just until I know nothing is amiss.
also check out https://docs.carbide3d.com/ for heaps of useful info.
and searching the forum or searching google returns a huge amount of results… for example anything like ‘workholding’ or ‘clamps’ or ‘Carbide Create SVG import’ all bring up heaps of info.
hope this has helped, it’s not really specific to the HDZ or Zero3 probe, or cncjs, just a bit of a process to follow… I figure just ask about specific bits that don’t make sense and people will explain