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Nelson, I was wondering, if I had a digitizing probe along with the mach2/3 software and used the wizard within the program could I take an existing violin/archtop top plate and copy it into g-code? how difficult would this be? and what would the copy come out like?

Thanks again!

Hi Ed
The wizard is user friendly and asks for inputs such as the size of the rectangular field to cover while digitizing as well as distance between rows and columns of points to probe. An example would be a row spacing of, say, .250" with a column spacing of .125".   It might take a couple hours+ to hit this many points on a 17" archtop plate, for example.
Mach3 places the X, Y and Z coordinates of each point probed on a line in a text file that you prename.
You can then take this text file and add the appropriate lines of initial Gcode to it and then machine with it. This file is in the form of a point cloud and the cutter follows the same path that the probe took while digitizing.
Nelson