Good advice.
As I was getting nowhere with AutoCad, I made the transition to Solidworks last week (thanks Carl for the advice etc)
None of my existing models have imported into Solidworks correctly, but I have been able to edit them in autocad and import 2d outlines to start from near scratch in Solidworks.
Basically over six months has been wasted on autocad and now I'm starting from again, but with a few steps backwards as now I am not even familiar with the Solidworks software so its a VERY slow process.
I had an engineer come around last week who uses autocad every day as his full time job and even he struggled to draw my contours etc, he made the suggestion to try Solidworks.
So after hearing it (Solidworks) from the guys here, from the engineer, from the guy building my machine, I figured it was time to stop being stubborn and just take people's advice, even if it does mean starting from scratch.
I had the CAD engineer come over again last night for a few hours to teach me how to use Solidworks, but it turns out he hasn't touched it since he was a student and being he uses autocad all day every day he'd completely forgotten Solidworks and needs to learn it again himself.
Looks like even if this machine gets delivered in a few weeks, I won't have any models to sent its way. Will be a while till I'm cutting wood.