Interesting, I hadn’t ever seen any discussion of cam side stuff in freecad, I might have to keep tabs on it a bit more. Looking at their wiki pages for the cam workbench it seems pretty far from adequate for my needs though.

Does free cad have any cam functionality?

They have a window on the side of the machine enclosure open so they can fit a long workpiece in it. If they turned on the coolant it would end up spraying some outside the machine and make a mess.