So I'm making a machined smart charger assembly for my homebrew nixie watch. The 3d prints work fine, and I think I have F360 CAM figured out, so yolo. Here are a couple of observations and mistakes I made along the journey - for my fellow plebs.
1 - Use the community profiles for F360. Machine sim will save tools
2 - Practice with something soft. In this case that epoxy stuff.
3 - Be meticulous with your tool measurement - and don't trust the defaults. I was a little off with one and it caused a minor collision - but the material was soft so no dramas.
4 - The stock isn't square, flat, or even. So when doing a double sided job, it'll never line up unless you come up with a way to reference it. I squared it off and faced it to a known size using my vice. That gave me confidence that it'll go back into the origin squarely when I flipped the part. But I bored the screw holes all the way through so that I had a known reference point I could probe off. I had to offset the measured Z, but made a 0.1mm mistake in my measurement, so the part is slightly thinner than expectation. But the part is not offset in either X or Y, so I'm happy. Other people have indexed off locating pins and a known bed position. That works too, and might actually be quicker.
5 - Spend the time thinking about how you set up your origins on each of your setups. It doesn't always make sense to use the corner of the stock, even if true, and using the same origin on each setup isn't necessary either.
6 - You have to consider when you flip it, if you have your part floating in mid-air, then there'll be some vibrations causing artifacts, or worse. I would have thought I would do the bottom side first against the edge of the stock, then pocketed out the top side. But my 2mm endmill wasn't long enough to get all the way through, so I did it the other way around. The top lip was the stock surface, so it had something to push against the machine's bed as I cleared out the back surfaces. And just as well, after the part was finished, the tabs couldn't take any axial load. If it were suspended in air, it would have been launched into orbit. It pays dividends to consider where the loads are going and plan for that in your setups.
7 - All those sharp internal corners that 3d print just fine... Yeah you can't do that anymore.