X-Carve as a budget CNC?

[RoboChair]

Originally Posted by cbale2000

As far as mounting it is concerned, the Bridgeport has a work area of like 8" x 40", meaning the parts have to be pre-cut, have the edges cleaned up, and then milled individually (very time consuming). Also being a 2-axis CNC means that an operator has to control the Z-axis manually, which takes even more time and can lead to human error.
As for programming, the Bridgeport is like 30 years old (uses floppy disks). While it does run on G-Code, modern G-Code formatting appears to be incompatible with it. Consequently all the programming is done using the interface on the machine.

From what you are describing here it sounds like you have an EZ-TRAK? If so you can use HSMxpress to generate G-code for it after tweaking some parameters, that's what we do anyway. Alternatively you can take the time to modify a post processor's code so that it uses the correct syntax that the Bridgeport will understand(or edit the posted code manually if you are feeling masochistic).