Newb from beautiful Orange County, CA

[ZakRabbit]

My name is Zak, I'm a CNC programmer/setup/op at a machine shop here in Orange, CA. We specialize in making parts for Harleys (I won't mention our big customers' names, but if you know baggers, you know them and some of my work especially on the latest Victory and Indian parts.) I'm a total geek, my background is actually automotive: race cars, step-child to the creator of HRE Performance Wheels, auto mechanic, rotorhead, and got involved in CNC as a career when that same creator of HRE decided to open a new place called Nutek wheels. I would really love to get involved in truly additive manufacturing of aluminum and such, and I believe the 3d printing will be a great step in understanding how it might work. As I'm familiar with at least Haas G-code, how is printer code different? I see "E" denotes a filament feed, any other differences/similarities?
How about printing in English units as opposed to purely metric? Sorry for the long post, just very excited to be here! I look forward to being part of this community.

[Eaglezsoar]

Hi Zak! I wanted to welcome you to the forum.
I do not know what Haas G-Code is but one of our members should be able to answer your question.
We appreciate having you as a member and hope that you become active with more questions or to help other members.

[IMBoring25]

The specifics of some of the gcode will depend on what firmware you run. There's a summary at http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code . The SeeMeCNC printers run Repetier firmware out of the box. You'll see code there for using inches, but as long as the STL is exported in the expected units you can develop the model in whatever units you want.

[ZakRabbit]

Thank you both for the replies! I work with Haas vertical milling machines, and they just have "tweaks" for their machines. I'm used to using "G20" at the beginning of a program to specify inches while a "G21" will specify metric. Much like "G90" is absolute and "G91" is incremental positioning. I've started looking through all the build threads and learning what I can, I'm primarily interested in the Rostock Max which will probably feature heavy in Tricklaser parts...