I'm an old retired lady who thought I could make some extra money with a CNC... I bought my first CNC last spring, a Digital Wood Carver desktop machine. (Their biggest selling point was that I didn't have to put it together. I'm great with assembling things, but horrible at fine-tuning and calibration!) Things were going fairly good until I had a couple of setbacks. The first was when Vectric version 12 came out. I downloaded it, and right afterward my PC prompted me to update to Windows 11 and I thought what the heck? Might as well! The next day when I opened my PC, all of my Vectric project files, that I had spent hours creating and working on, had just disappeared! Worst yet, some of them were projects I had been asked to make by my sister as presents for her friends. All that was left was the G-Code. Laney from DWC tried helping me recover them but neither of us could find them. So, after another couple of weeks recreating the projects, suddenly one day a bunch of the lost files just reappeared in my folder. I reverted back to Windows 10! All was going fairly well until just before the holidays. I was using an IDC Beast bit with a new muscle chuck, and the muscle chuck, which I had just spent $50 of my very limited income on, disintegrated...I was just disheartened and didn't get back to it. What I did do was invest in the Learn Your CNC course and did it, marveling at how much time I could have saved if I had done this right off the bat. I watch all the videos and live shows I can, from Ryan, Garrett, Andy, Hamilton, Mark Lindsey, etc. I have a supply of black walnut and cedar lumber that my dad milled back in the late 90s, and was using that for some of the things I was trying to make at first. I discovered that rough cut lumber is a pain in the you know what, and getting things lined up on an edge that's not straight is a nightmare. When I started this, I didn't think about the other tools I'd likely need, such as planers, joiners, etc. to be able to use that lumber or the hours of surfacing they'd require without those tools. So last week I took the plunge, took advantage of Ryan's Black Friday special, and ordered some ready-to-go materials from CIC (and spoke to a lovely lady called Brenda), and I'm looking forward to having nice things to work with, as well as my new understanding of Vectric because of the course, and actually can envision having fun with my CNC!