3018 PRO - Making a spoilboard

ready to make a sporeboard for your 3018 pro then stick around because that's what we're doing today [Music] hey everyone and welcome to another episode of james dean designs now today we're going to be making a spoil board for the 3018 pro now as in some previous tutorials this is based on the original guide by graeme bland you can find the link to the full tutorial of his in the description below because he goes into some detail that we don't necessarily cover in this video also if you're watching this looking for a guide on how to do a sportboard for the prover then again download that tutorial have a read of it because he talks about the slight differences that are needed to produce one for the prover instead of the pro also in the description area you'll find links to all the different bits that we'll be using today and anything else useful for this tutorial so definitely check it out now if you're here you probably have an idea of why a spoil board is useful but i will just quickly run through why that is your bed isn't always perfectly level it should be close but sometimes it can be a little bit off so what we do is fit a spore board and face it which is just take a top layer off and it means then your bed is perfectly level to your x-axis more importantly it means you can fully cut through different types of material without worrying about damaging the aluminium bed that's already on there so it's got multi-purpose multi-function the small board is really at the end of the day and it just allows us to do more successful cuts and get more accuracy out of our machine so with that out of the way let's take a look at the bits that we're going to need to work through today's tutorial so obviously the first thing we need is a piece of mdf but actually we need two pieces of mdf and i'll explain this shortly this is 180 millimeters by 300 millimeters and six millimeters deep or quarter inch you'll also need a surfacing bit the one i'm using today is 20 mil in diameter you can use anything as low as 30 ml but it can't be any lower than that for the code that we're using today the other thing to note about a surfacing bit is they often have a thicker shank this is a quarter inch shank so as you can see it's much thicker than their typical bits that go in the 3018 pro as a result you will need a collet insert to take that extra thickness this one takes 6.5 millimeters and it is the perfect fit for this you can either buy these individually or you can often buy them in packs with multiple sizes again all links will be provided in the description below to give you an idea of what it is you actually need next we'll need a 3.175 flat end mill or one eighth flat end mill these are just from soundsmart and they will just be used for cutting the little slots that we'll be putting in the spoil board shortly it's an optional extra but what we do at the end is put a grid on there and we use something like a 10 20 or 30 degree v bit in order to engrave that grid onto the board so you'll need one of those as well they typically come with the machine when you purchase it and finally you'll need our favorite method for holding material down which is blue tape and some sort of super glue or ca glue today we'll be using a star bond so obviously we want to make a spoiler board that still allows the slots in the aluminium bed to take the clamps and that's exactly what we're going to do but in order to cut slots through the material it would either damage the aluminium bed or you would need to put a scrap piece of material underneath in order to protect it and that's exactly what we're going to do but we're going to be a bit more intelligent about this and actually make two boards at the same time so that we have a secondary board when we need one but it also provides the protection that we need when we're cutting through so essentially what we're going to do is cut all the slots on one side cut all the slots on the other side flip both pieces over and do exactly the same again on each side and this guarantees that we have two boards that are identical all the slots are in the same place and therefore when one is damaged later in the future we have a backup and if we ever need to produce a spoil board again we only need to do one in the future because we already have a base and a protection for it to work from so we're going to use a piece of code to mill the slots in here and we'll essentially do this four times we'll go one two flip it over and go three four now in order to make sure all these slots align what we need to do is put a center line down the piece of each material now we know this should be 180 millimeters wide so the middle of this will be 90 millimeters so we'll quickly mark 90 and we'll do it up the other end as well mark 90 there and draw a line between them now there is a little bit of room for error if you don't get this perfect problem the closer you can get it the more accurate your slots will come out and we'll quickly do the same on the other side now now this next step isn't essential but it will make your life that little bit easier when you're machining these shortly because we need to do four different sets of cuts and then log two on either side it just helps to keep these held together and it just makes everything align that little bit better so we're going to quickly do you just clamp them together make sure they are actually aligned as best we can get them i think that's pretty good i'm just going to put a thin a quick strip of blue tape overlapping the joint on both of the long edges and this should just ensure that they stay together a little bit better when we're moving things around [Music] shortly as it's only blue tape it also means it shouldn't get in the way of any of the machining that we're doing so it's going to stick that down fold it around nice and tight and stick it back on the underneath we'll do that on the opposite side as well so before we actually start machining anything we need to get an idea of how level our bed is in relation to the x-axis now they should be fairly close but ideally we want to make sure it's less than half a millimeter difference between any of the four corners now the way we're going to test this is basically get the bit to touch the bed in one corner we're going to raise it up five millimeters send it over to the other side and slowly lower it down again to five millimeters now obviously if it touches the bed before it gets to that five millimeters it means this corner is high if it doesn't quite touch the bed it means the corners low and what we should be able to gauge is what the difference is on all four corners now as i say you want to keep it less than half a millimeter because it will show up in some of the results later on when we surface in the bed but if it is more than half a mil out what you can do is use something like thin washes or something to pack the brackets up underneath here just to try and get it as level as possible so i'm quickly going to run through this now you should be able to see what i'm trying to achieve so we know that is touching the bed so we're going to raise this up by five millimeters send it over to the other side let's send that over by about i don't know 250 millimeters [Music] first i'm going to lower it down by four millimeters see how close that gets us and um looks like there's still a bit of a gap so i'm going to tie that down at least one more millimeter and there's still a gap just about so i'm going to change the increments on the step size now and bring that down to naught point one and then just slowly lower it down until it touches the bed and that will tell me how much it's out in that corner so one two just touching the bed now so that means that that corner is 0.2 millimeters lower than the other side if we bring that back up 0.2 millimeters and then bring it back up five millimeters and send it forward to the other corner so we'll take that about 150 millimeters back [Music] or a little bit more that's just landed on the gap so i'm just going to push that back another five millimeters maybe there we are we're going to lower that down at five millimeters again and again it is just above the surface of the bed so we'll change the increment again to 0.1 millimeters lower that down and again that side is also 0.2 millimeters off so that's within an acceptable tolerance we'll rise that back up and again bring it back up another five millimeters send it back over to the other side [Music] [Music] do exactly the same in this fourth corner so we're going to lower it down by five millimeters again and actually that is perfectly touching the bed so what that basically means after testing all four corners is this side of the bed is 0.2 millimeters lower than this side of the bed as i said that's an acceptable tolerance to work with if yours is more than that you may just need to say pack one of the corners up or multiple corners or even level it out just so that you're roughly within that tolerance on all four corners so what we've done now is just clamp our boards lightly to the bed and i say lightly because there is still a bit of play in these and we can still move the bed about and the reason that this is important we want to get the boards as level with the y-axis as we can that's one of the reasons we drew this center line so what we're going to do is basically bring the bit to this edge here and line it up as central on that line as we possibly can we're then going to send it back about 110 mil this way and see how accurate it is on that line and one of the reasons we've left the club slightly loose is so that we can adjust the bed slightly if that is out of alignment so we're just going to do that now we're going to pull this bit right back and lower it down a little bit and just basically get as close to the center of that line as we possibly can at this stage it doesn't need to be perfectly accurate in terms of the zed height but it does matter in getting it central to that actual line itself so that's a little bit off we're going to move that over sometimes it can help to rotate the bit to see how it actually aligns to it what i'm going to try and do is push that forward a little bit just so you can see the line itself a little bit still to the left so we'll take that over just by one more millimeter or too much 0.5 we'll pull it back there we are that is about center now what we're going to do is just lift that up a little bit and send it back 110 millimeters to see how accurate that is further back now if i lower that down again that's actually pretty accurate now obviously if the line was off to one side or the other you would just need to adjust your bed slightly to make sure that they're even and then come back to the start but as i say that's that's pretty accurate so i'm going to clamp that down nice and tight in that position do be careful when you tighten clamps they can move the bed so we will just come back and check that slot shortly all right let's come back to the beginning yeah that appears to have stayed in place another great tip at this point is because we've got to do four cuts and they need to stay in exactly the same place on the bed it's a good idea to actually mark up on your aluminium bed where the boards sit and it just makes it easier to keep the level later on so putting some nice pencil marks on here and that way i know later on when we spin the board round we've got the exact place that this will sit to do all four cuts one thing i actually should have mentioned before actually clamping these down the dimensions of the cuts we'll be making shortly are 110 millimeters so obviously the bed runs 180 so you've got a little bit of play either end so the boards don't need to be exactly on the edge of the bed they can sit within it a little bit so this is about i know 15 20 millimeters and that should be more than sufficient to allow all the trouble when doing the cutting shortly so with the machine set up let's take a look at the computer and the files so when you download the link in the description you'll get a collection of files like this make sure you unzip them and put them somewhere accessible like your desktop now we start with the pdf that is the guide from graham definitely have a read of it there's lots of extra useful information in them and then we have a series of different cutting files we have the slots which is what we're about to start with we then have the engrave which is the grid that we'll do at the very end and we also have the face which is basically where we level the board to make sure it's all parallel with the x-axis and as you can see graham's done a great job of providing files for the prover and the pro as well and if you read the guide he also talks about what the html files as well if you want to use them so what we'll do now is move over to ugs now i've already connected the machine and what we're basically going to do is set the zero point on the very edge of the board so we know that it's center to that line but we also need to make sure that it starts right on the edge of the board for when we're about to begin at the engraving so we're just going to bring the step size down maybe something like half a mil half a millimeter just keep moving it back until it's right over the edge of the board and so essentially half of the bit should be hanging over now what i actually haven't mentioned yet this is where we're using the 3.175 flat end mill or the one eighth end mill so this is what's installed at the moment so we're just going to pull that back a little bit and we'll keep going it's nearly there as i say it should just be so roughly half of the bit is hanging off the edge of the material now with that in place what we're going to do is basically set the zero at that point so we'll click reset zero now you're probably thinking why haven't we set the zed height correctly at this point now you can either do this with a zed probe or by oil what piece of paper whatever is is your favorite method but the reason i haven't done it is you don't have to set the z point at this area obviously half it's overhanging so it's kind of difficult to see so we're going to just lift this up slightly and move it back into the board by about 20 millimeters [Music] and it's much easier to set it now that we're on the inside of the board so we'll slowly lower this back down and then we're going to decrease the increments down to not 0.2 millimeters and slowly lower that down until it touches the board you can often tell just by rotating it whether it's gripping the board or not not quite there there i can just hear that scratching the board so that's pretty close now as we've already set the zero we don't want to click reset zero again what we're actually going to do is come up to machine come down to actions and then come over to reset the zero so we're just setting the z now and it will remember the zero for the x and y that we've already done now if i lift this back up by a couple of millimeters and what i can actually do now is click return to zero and it should come to the very edge and start just overhanging that line but also central with that line as we've already done perfect so you can rotate the tool around just to check how it's looking on all sides but i'm pretty happy with that and where it's sitting now so what we'll do is load in the first file or the same file that we're going to use four times for cutting every side so we'll go open and we'll go to the desktop because that's where the files are stored we'll click in the spoilboard folder now the first one we're going to load in as just mentioned is the cut slots now as you will see there is a prover and pro for all the other files but not for the cut slot the slots make no difference on which one you're using so we'll open that up and what you can see i'll twist this slightly is it's basically going to take multiple passes but cut all of these four slots that we want we know the zero is in place because it's set there so basically let's get this started now one bit of advice graham does actually giving his guide is to lift the bit up off the board he creates a lot of his files in fusion 360 which doesn't always put the um the automatic retraction on before starting so we're going to lift this up by five millimeters and then set the job off and let's get it going so that's the first cut done this is where the job actually ends what we're going to do initially is just click return to zero [Music] and we're going to raise this up by i don't know about 20 millimeters and then send it back boy i don't know maybe another 120 millimeters back [Music] that just clears it out the way so literally we're going to release this now spin it round and do the opposite side one thing i should mention is obviously you are machining mdf and this isn't great on your lungs so if you're doing this anywhere like within a house or an unventilated area make sure you're using something like a vacuum to get up all the dust as it's milling so we'll quickly change this round now now if the camera can pick that up but we can clearly see the lines that we put in earlier so we just spin this round line it all up with everything that we've already marked up and we're good to go with the second set of cuts now obviously it does be a little bit repetitive but at the end of the day we get two spoil boards from doing this process you'll also notice i'm only clamping just the edges of this although there is a bit of clearance from the cut obviously you want to clean keep the clamps within about 10 millimeters of the edge just so the bit doesn't touch it when it gets near to cutting so with that held in place if we click return to zero [Music] perfect we're good to start the second set of cuts [Music] so we'll do exactly the same we'll click return to zero raise it up by 20 mil send it backwards [Music] except this time there will actually flip the board over into the grooves in the other side now did anyone spot the mistake that i did on the last run i didn't raise it up before starting the job so we will just do that again we'll raise it up 20 mil and let the job start so at this point you should have perfectly aligned slots between the top and bottom boards we'll do this procedure one more time and that should be all the cuts done on the board so that's all the slots cut let's remove this off the bed now there we have it so there is a slight overlap in the cuts where they haven't perfectly aligned but we're pretty happy with how that's come out and we've got two sporeboards ready so i've just wiped the bed down and giving it a bit of a clean get as much dust off as you possibly can i've also run some sandpaper around the edges of the cut just to make sure all the fry has been cleaned up we're now ready to mount this to the bed now you could use things like clamps to hold it down the problem is they just get in the way for future projects this is really where the blue tape and the glue start to come into play basically what we're going to do is apply a layer of blue tape all over the bed just cut out where the gaps are in the slots and then on all the blue tape is apply a quick layout of super glue hold the board down on the bed for a while until it sets and that'll give enough adhesion to hold the plate in place for all the future projects so with all the blue tape applied make sure everything's clean and we're now going to apply a layer of glue so the star bond that we're going to be applying today we'll just run a quick like s squiggly line across every strip if you've got any gaps in your tape like i have there try and keep the glue away from those you don't really want the glue twitching the bed itself once we've applied the glue we will drop the plate on and as i say this should be more or less a perfect fit get that in place and then use our clamps to actually hold it down the glue tip will take a minute or two to dry so you do have a bit of play time to get everything in place but the more pressure you can pour on it to hold it down obviously the better adhesion you're going to get let's get the glue applied and get the bed actually held down in place so generally speaking any clamps you've got to hold it down try and pay attention to the corners and make sure they're all held down and then just give it a few minutes to let it all set so the next step is to fit the surfacing bit in the collet insert and get all this set up ready for surfacing the bed but before we do so let's just briefly touch on tramming now what that basically means is how perpendicular your spindle is to the bed now if you imagine your spindle is on a slight angle when you're using a little bit like this you won't really notice anything but when you start using bigger bits like this it basically emphasizes how much of an angle that is and when it's cutting if it's at an angle it will leave tram marks across your bed depending on how it's leaning or how it's cutting now the slight issue with this is the 3018s don't really have any way of adjusting it sometimes you might tilt the gun tree to a layer for it or you might try and adjust the holder of the spindle to compensate for any angle fortunately most of these carriages do hold the spindle fairly perpendicular so it's kind of good and bad but if you've got any method just to double check it i would suggest doing so for example taking off the collet nut and using something like small set squares in there to try and check how perpendicular it is to the bed now with that out the way let's get this installed and move on to surfacing the bed now people often have trouble getting these inserts say they can be a bit fiddly because at the end of the day they're designed to stay in place you can try wobbling them out putting a bit of pressure underneath and sometimes they pop out easy sometimes they struggle but then that came out fairly easy if you are struggling you can use something like a small electrical screwdriver to put it in the top and just apply a bit of pressure to one side and they usually pop out with that released let's drop the new one in the bigger one so click that in place i'm and slide that up and then drop it into the holder turn it up with the spanners and we're good to go with that so what we're going to do now is surface the bed and what that basically means is we're going to make sure this bit runs all over the bed left to right front to back just to make sure it's been all cut at the same consistent height now as we know from earlier this side is not 0.2 mil lower or this side is 0.2 mil higher however you want to say it the program that we're going to use to actually cut everything we'll do two passes at 0.1 mil so the end result is it will take 0.2 mil off the top of everything or off the top of the highest point i should say now if your bed is more uneven than 0.2 mil you may just need to run this program several times what we're aiming for is to make sure that the bit has taken a little bit of material off every single area of the bed if you do it once and let's say it's taken some off this side and not really touch that side it means it's not done its job it needs to take a layer off every single part of the bed in order to guarantee that it is flat so we're going back to ugs now i did have a power cut in between this so that's why my screen's reset and everything's gone off it now what i've done down in this bottom left hand corner which is where the job is going to start is i've just placed a mark five million from the left and five million from the bottom and what we're hoping to do is to get the center of this bit on that little five mil mark so let's start by jogging it over to the left hand side or the bottom left hand corner so let's move it over about 14 140 millimeters and we'll bring it back about the same as well all right let's lower the z axis down at this point we'll bring that down by about 20 ml to start now we'll just bring the measurements down and slowly control it into place for where we need it so i'm just going to start by getting the x and y as close as possible now the purpose of actually doing this is the bit should overhand the edge slightly and when it does the full area of the bed it should take off all the corners so that is aside the bed is perfectly level now that's getting close let's lower it down a bit not quite there let's just reposition slightly i think i'm fairly happy with that on the x and y we will just lower it down slightly to make sure the zed is touching the bed as i say this is only going in increments of 0.1 millimeters so you do need to be quite precise about it just touching the top of the bed right so as always if you spin it slightly you should feel that it just about catches the bed a little bit of resistance and that is it perfectly so at that point we will reset the zero and just for safety we will raise it back up by about five millimeters just as a safety clearance now we'll load in the surface in program we go open and the one we're after is the facing for the pro not the prover so we click on spoil board face pro open that up now as you can see if i just tilt this slightly it is literally just doing a series going forward and back forward and back forward and back all the way over and we can see this number over here on the right hand side 10.2 millimeters so we know 10 ml is the clearance height that it will do and then it's adding the 0.2 millimeters on for actually surfacing the board itself right so with that done let's start the job so it only really started touching the bed it's about half way and it did all of this but didn't really do the first section of the bed so i'm going to lower it down another 0.2 millimeters and run at the whole surfacing program again now just to correct myself from earlier it does it in 0.2 mil in one pass as opposed to two separate 0.1 mil passes as i mentioned earlier now a quick tip just so you can see if it really is touching the bed on every area take a pencil and simply just scribble across the bed now when it surfaces the bed obviously it should take all of that off so by the time it's finished you shouldn't be able to see any pencil marks so let's lower this down another 0.2 mil reset the zero and send it back off again actually we'll raise it back up by five mil for safety and send it on its way so everything has now been faced the pencil marks have all gone if you have some high points in the corners it's just because obviously it's a round bit and it doesn't always reach the extents of every corner it's one of the reasons that i've gone for a slightly bigger bit other than the 13 mil however if you do have those raised corners just use something like a piece of sandpaper or a sharp knife just to take them off and make sure everything is flat so earlier on i mentioned about tramming i can show you an actual example of what that looks like now because it happened whilst facing the board you can see on the photo on screen there are some very faint lines appearing they only really appear in certain lighting but you can see them if i run my finger over it i barely feel them if they're more pronounced than this i may try and tackle it and re-tram the spindle just to get rid of all those lines or sand the surface back a little bit to make it flatter but as i say i can barely feel them so i'm going to leave it as it is now essentially that's your spoiled board done you've cut it you fitted it you faced it and everything is now parallel with the x-axis however there is one more enhancement we can do just to make it a bit better and that's engraver grid on top for alignment now say alignment not measurement because you don't really measure things on the bed and in order for that grid to be accurate two measurements you would have to have done all the tuning steps on your stepper motors which not everybody does however what it does mean is we can perfectly align things to our x and our y axis and just get better results every time we start to machine them so let's move back over get that grid engraved and that'll be the last step on the spoil board so what i've done off camera is installed a 20 degree v bit it doesn't matter if it's 10 20 30 degrees as long as it is quite sharp and pointy because the lines that we're trying to put in the bed are going to be very thin one thing i also had to do was lower down my spindle in the carriage slightly because these bits are a little bit shorter so i just needed to make sure it touched the top of the bed without bottoming out the z axis now as i just stressed this is an alignment grid not a measurement grid what you may see is when we carve this the grid isn't perfectly parallel to the bed because sometimes when you install the bed it can be at a slight angle but what the grid lines will be perfectly parallel to is the y-axis and the x-axis as i say just making it easier for us to align things on future jobs so we'll come over to ugs now and we'll open up the spoil board engrave profile now position the bit about five mil in from either end and it's just top touching the top of the board so at this point we'll click reset zero and then we'll raise it up five millimeters for safety as we have done previously and with that done we can get the job started [Music] so once the grid has been engraved it may leave it slightly raised just go over it lightly with a bit of sandpaper just to take the raised edges off you should have a perfect grid ready at the end of it so we've just cut mounted faced and engraved our spoil board we even have one ready for when that needs replacing last bit of advice if you've got something like a wax or a varnish consider applying it to the top of your spoil board just makes it a little bit more durable and gets rid of some of that fuzziness you often get with freshly milled mdf you can even go step third if you've got a laser engraver and consider doing something like putting your logo in the middle because well it does look cool big thank you to graham bland for writing his tutorials as i said at the start do download and have a read of it because it goes into information that we don't often have time to cover in these videos so it's well worth the time you can find the link to that below along with any links for bits and stuff that we've used on the machine such as the uh flattening bit the glue that type of thing final thank you goes out to my patreon supporters you allow me to keep making these videos it is really appreciated if you want to get involved and support the channel again follow the links in the description area that is everything for today's episode as always if you enjoyed it please give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel and comment below i really do love chatting with everybody but until then i'll see you on the next video

Channel: James Dean Designs

Views: 113,261

Keywords: 3018PRO, 3018 pro, 3018 pro CNC, CNC, 3018, 3018pro build, 3018 pro assembly, small cnc, desktop cnc, laser cnc, woodworking cnc, woodworking, test cut, CNC software, Using 3018, 3018 beginner, 3018pro beginner, 3018 tips ticks, cnc tips tricks, cnc help, laser, diode laser, cnc laser, laser help, setting up a laser, laser issues, Laser engraving, laser power, cnc beginner, spoilboard, making a spoilboard, spoil board, 3018 spoilboard

Id: cU50YbPNpvo

Length: 34min 55sec (2095 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/rignewbiee]

He has a lot of good videos . I just wish people would stop with that "ZED" crap. Lol

[u/le_hohoho]

I can also recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n2gEmHEaao

It made me realize my 3018 pro doesn't have to be that slow :D