HI BG,

I get involved with all types of work cnc based for others mostly, the majority of my work is done by hand. However I do use and help others with drawing for cnc and do a lot of high level 3dprinting and for this I use 98% MoI, the rest being done in Rhino, 3D Coat and Blender. For upto 3 axis I use MeshCAM($250 for Basic and $500 for pro), for upto 5 axis I would probably look at using MadCAM, as an add on for Rhino. I was talking to them a couple of years ago and they were looking at writing a standalone version to work with MoI, but I don't know if this has happened yet.

Re How you are looking at working I would use a standardised cnc, xyz with a rotary encoder as 4th axis. I had one built for me exactly to this spec a couple of years ago by https://amastone.com/cnc-router-marble-amastone-next/.

If all of your pieces are basically cylindrically based then I would probably look at a cnc lathe as they take top far less space, but you'd probably need something like MadCAM to drive it. https://youtu.be/uPS7fYY8tt0

Hope this helps, get back to me if you need any more info

- James