3018 PRO - Tips and tricks

hi everyone and welcome to another episode today we're going to be going through some tips and tricks on your 3018 pro so let's get stuck in so most people who buy a 3018 pro are often at the start of a cnc journey and much like myself a few months ago you spend that much time just learning how to use the machine you don't always know the tips and tricks to make life easier and that's what we're going to go through today we're going to look a little bit of maintenance on the machine and keeping it running as smooth as possible we're going to look at different ways of holding material down to the bed we're going to talk a little bit about aids that help when cutting we're also going to touch on setup and calibration just to make sure you're getting the most out of your machine i'll put time codes below in the description just in case you want to skip ahead to any particular section but what we're going to start with is sound and vibration now for such a small machine one of the biggest complaints is often how noisy it is and the majority of that noise is down to the vibration so we can look at a few different ways to try and control this one of the first options is simply to enclose the machine and that physically reduces the amount of noise you're hearing now i've built an enclosure behind me it'll be a link up in the corner with the uh plans if you want to download and build your own but i've seen more creative ways of doing this simply putting clear container boxes over the top obviously that helps reduce the noise and contains the dust and is a much cheaper and easier option so don't always think you've got to go down the route of building a full enclosure now the other two options is we can either look to reduce the amount of vibration off the machine is transferring through to work surfaces or we can look to reduce the amount of vibration in the machine itself by tweaking a few things and to do that we'll take a closer look at the machine there so we've briefly spoke about containing the noise within an enclosure but that's not always practical for everyone because they can be quite big and cumbersome it's also not addressing the source of the noise which is the vibration now one of the vibrations is the machine itself shaking on the workbench or the surface it's sitting on so let's take a look at that simple solution is to use furniture pads these can be sourced quite cheaply in most diy stores you can also cut them up to different sizes make them as thick or as thin as needed you can buy more expensive versions of these but to be honest the cheap ones do just the same job for the purpose that we're using you also then need to look at the machine itself and its movement now in an ideal world you want to fix the machine down to a solid surface such as a workbench but that's not always practical for everyone so an alternative solution that i've seen is to fix the fix the machine to a solid piece of mdf or plywood like this in the background what that means is if you leave a bit of overhang on each side you can clamp that down to the to the workbench itself rather than having to clamp the machine you want to avoid applying clamps on the machine itself because you've run the risk of twisting the bed what we're also not addressing at the minute is the source of the vibration and that's what we'll look at now obviously all this comes from the spindle these things spin at anything from 7000 rpm up to 20 000 rpm if you've got an upgraded one and any slight imbalance within this setup will just add to the vibration that's going on there so let's take a look at the different components you've got the er 11 chuck you've got the collet and the nut itself then you have the bit that you're using to cut now all these components have a different degree of tolerance and although this is meant to sit quite snugly onto the center of the spindle there will be a slight degree of movement and if you tighten one side more than the other then it will just offset it in one direction so it's worth actually trying to count the amount of turns you do on each side to keep it as balanced as possible you then have the nut and the collet now i did an experiment a couple of weeks ago where i took off my old collet nut and replaced it with a new one there was a seven decibel difference in the readout with the old one being louder now i'm not sure if the old one was just off balance to begin with well it's worn down over time either way it made quite a bit of difference also your cutting bits now typically these are brought in cheap off places like amazon or ebay and if you imagine it only has to be a fraction off center and as that spins round it's just another imbalance in this setup now we are talking fractions of imbalance here but when you add them all together they can just multiply and if they sit on one particular side it's just going to cause more vibrations in everything let's also look at the spindle itself so this is an example of a typical stock spindle that most people get now you'll notice that on the bar one side has been milled flat and this is to allow the chuck to clamp to it better rather than trying to clamp to a rounded edge if you think about it what that does it actually makes the spindle itself off balance because it's missing a part of the material i didn't realize how much of difference this made until i found a spindle that had a full stem now when you take into consideration the difference in the spindle there the new collet i put on with the collet nut there was nearly a 25 decibel difference in the amount of noise from my old spindle to the new one so all these factors combined really do make a big difference in the amount of vibration and sound that you're getting from the machine so what's on the subjective vibration i just want to point something out to you as you can see around these two bearings there's a grey substance and this is two-part epoxy resin that i had to put in place to hold the bearings in i had quite a bad spindle on that shook it so bad all of the bearings came out of place and i needed something to hold them in now there's a bit of a debate as to what's the best method to hold them in either epoxy resin or a grub screw personally for me if you put a grub screw in here it can potentially distort the bearings so i went with epoxy resin the downside to this is it means you can't remove the bearings easily afterwards so it's something to bear in mind but i just wanted to highlight this because you need to keep an eye on the bearings to make sure that they're sitting the housing because as soon as they start to come out that can cause some serious damage so moving on from vibration in noise but not too far if you ever notice that when you move the x y and z axis as sometimes there's a bit of a high-pitched squeak well that's come from friction now when these machines arrive from the manufacturer they typically arrive dry and what that means is there's no lubrication and this is where the maintenance schedule starts to come into play so these machines have lots of components that constantly rub on each other such as the linear rails and the bearings and when metal rubs upon metal one you get the noise but you also get friction which generates heat and that's bad for the metal because eventually whichever is the softer of the two will start to wear down over time now you may not notice any difference instantly but eventually maybe the bed becomes a bit loose so there's a bit more play in one of the axis or in a worst case scenario a bearing could fail causing a jam and possibly even a crack and that pretty much ruins your machine so we need to apply lubricant to keep everything running more smoothly and this is probably one of the big things that they don't often tell you when you get the machine so when you start talking about lubricant people often think oil or grease now in most case scenarios that is correct but in a machine that generates dust something like grease is a bad lubricant because the grease clings to the dust and will then start to churn that back into the bearings causing them to clog up and jam so it's actually probably a bad lubricant to use on these machines what we need to do is look at something called dry lubricant or ptfe lubricant now this is quite clever because it allows minimal friction between the metal but it also stops dirt from clinging to it so it's quite a clean lubricant to use i use two different types on my machine i use this one by mock off this is a slightly thicker consistency and at the end of the night when i clean the machine down and i'll talk more about that in a second i apply a thin layer of this to all the different rails and axis and just work it in a little bit now i also use a second one which is by protelling the reason i use the second one is it's a thinner consistency it's also an aerosol and it's got this great spray nozzle now if you're doing a long job maybe four five six hours even longer as some of you out there do you want to keep the machine lubricated whilst it's running and trying to get into the tight spots with something like this can be really difficult you could end up causing like causing it to jam miss some steps and that will ruin your job whereas something like this you can spray them from a distance at tighter angles so you can keep the machine lubricated whilst it's running so i just touched on maintenance and what i like to do at the end of every night once i've been cutting is give everything a good clean down so what i'll do is get the vacuum out and i'll get something like a little paintbrush and i'll get into all the tight spots and get as much dust out as possible because the least amount of dust that's in there the better it will run and it stops causing as many issues i'll also give everything a wipe down so even though we'd be using a much cleaner lubricant you can still get a build up of lubricant and dirty lubricant so such as i'm showing you now but what you want to do is give this a wipe down every couple of days and just make sure it's clean and not building up and once you've wiped all the old lubricant off you can then put a new coating of fresh lubricant on the other thing i also do is go around and check all of the connections and this is something that's really important so anyone who follows me on instagram may have seen a few weeks ago i had a bit of an accident with the machine which caused the spindle to blow and the board and it cost quite a bit to replace them now i'm pretty sure the reason that happened is one of these connections actually came loose it reduced the amount of power going to the spindle and that's why it jammed so it's really important to go around and check all these connections not only at the end of the day but also before you start a new job just to make sure that there is no issues and you're minimizing as much potential for things to go wrong as possible now as well as maintenance what can you do to help keep the machine clean well one of the more obvious things is to minimize the amount of dust actually coming off your machine and that's where accessories like this dust boot starts to come into play and we'll move on to accessories now so one of the first accessories i got from my machine was a dust shoe now the way these work is you connect your vacuum to them and it just allows the dust to be extracted right from where the tip is cutting and it keeps everything much cleaner and stops it throwing as much dust into the air the design of them is typically quite simple if you've got a 3d printer that can be found on thingiverse if not they can be purchased from elsewhere online they simply click onto your carriage you connect your vacuum to it and then as it moves across obviously the vacuum moves with it and therefore extracts all the dust and keep everything nice and tidy now this is great if you're doing short jobs but if you're doing long jobs then you don't really want to keep your vacuum running for three or four hours so what you can do is use a light timer switch with them and this just can set your vacuum to come on maybe every 10 to 15 minutes and clear some of the dust up obviously it's not going to be as efficient as keeping it on permanently but it will just help to keep things tidy now the second accessory that i brought is cable protectors with your x and y axis on these motors this is less relevant because they are static however on your z-axis and the power supply for the splint spindle this is constantly moving back and forth and therefore it runs the chance of the wires rubbing on the gantry so you just want to give protection to these because otherwise they will eventually start to wear down or they can get caught on something else and potentially ruin a job even ruin some parts on the machine now this is quite a simple one it is just plastic spiral and you can pick these up from places like amazon and ebay they're also quite cheap if you want something more complex you can buy fully 3d printed systems that sit up here and they're like a roller track that just winds back and forth as the machine does now the next accessory is a zed probe what a zed probe for is for setting your z-axis to the perfect height of your material rather than doing it by eye or trying to slide a piece of paper in there you're telling the machine the exact measurements of it now you can buy these pre-built but they can also be made for a very small amount of money you're literally talking a couple of wires two crocodile clips and a scrap piece of metal now all you need to know is the thickness of that metal for it to work and then you program that into something like candle or ugs and the way it works is you will set the zed probe off it will come down and once it touches the metal plate and it will come back up it will know to add on the thickness of that plate to the measurement so for ease let's say that plate is two mil it will come down take that reading come back up it knows to add two mil to it and it comes back down it will sit on the top of your material perfectly now this is great one if you're doing repetitive cuts but also if you need to change the bit over during a cut so for example if you're doing a clearance cut with something like a flat end mill and then you need to switch to something like a tapered ball knows what's in at the moment it's just an easy way to guarantee you get the zed height the same for both cuts so two very common accessories that i've not mentioned is the offline controller and limit switches now one of the reasons i don't have an offline controller is because i've always got my pc permanently connected to my machine i'm fortunate enough to be able to have them sitting together right behind me now an offline controller is great if for example you have a laptop and you don't want to leave your laptop permanently connected to the machine because you need to take it elsewhere or if you have something like a desktop that sits in a different room or a different building you can simply load the program onto a memory card put that into the offline controller and set the machine running so it requires less resource to actually keep the machine going now there are some limitations to the offline controllers one they only have a small screen i like to be able to see the visualizer in ugs and actually watch everything running the other limitation is they don't work great with z probes so from what i understand you either have to make some modifications or every time you export the code you have to put an extra piece of code in there to get it to activate the zed probe and that's just one thing that i'm not interested in doing the other accessory that i just mentioned is limit switches now what limit switches do is it basically tells your operating program that that's as far as the carriage will go so for example on the x-axis as it comes over it will hit a limit switch and say don't go any further and it you'll have one on either side just to make sure it doesn't drive the motor too far and you know get that jamming noise that you often get you typically fit them on every axis on both sides so you'd have two for the x-axis two for the z-axis and two for the y-axis now one of the downsides to the limit switches you do lose a bit of cutting area there is no way to avoid this so for example if your x-axis is a 300 ml cutting area when you fit a limit switch to either side they may be anything between five and ten mil so then you have to minus that width off your cutting distance so in a worst case scenario a 300 mil x axis would come down to something like 290 ml so that is one of the downsides to them but they are great if you're using something like light burn for doing laser work the way light burn works is it wants to touch every side of every axis to know where your bed and your homing area is and then what it can do it will know that this position down here is the start position or that position is the furthest position away so they just help to hone things in but again they're not essential and it's one accessory that i don't have and if i'm honest i don't plan on buying one anytime soon because there are ways to work without them now we've gone through accessories let's take a look at the bed and have a look at different ways that we can fix material down to it so let's start to look at ways we can mount onto the bed itself now typically these are the type of clamps that you'll receive with your kit it's just a normal bolt that goes into the bed if you're fortunate enough to have the ones that come with a t-bolt great they grip much better but if you just have these we can make a quick upgrade straight away to make life easier we'll swap out what is a normal bolt with a coach bolt the reason for this is when your normal bolt is in these slots they spin around quite easily making it difficult to tighten them up a coach bolt has this squared section on the bottom and that sits within the grooves and it means you can turn the butterfly knot and tighten it up much easier and that's exactly what i've done on my own on my own clubs is replace them all with coach bolts the other complaint you often hear people make about these type of clamps is they don't feel that good but i've used them for quite a while and i've been pretty happy with them they grip the wood really well but i think what often is the fault is the way people are using them as they're tightening the butterfly nut up the plate starts to come up this way if you imagine that's the piece of wood there the pressures are being applied down but because it's at that angle it's also pushing the wood away at the same time and i'll show you an example of this now so if we bring this in and just try and quickly clamp it down but with an upward angle as just mentioned i don't know if the camera picks that up but that's at a slight upward angle and what it means is that this can actually move pretty easy and be pulled out now if we do it the other way and have the plate facing down it changes the pressure and the way it's applied to the wood never going to have the camera picks it up but that's just above level so the front is actually pointing down into the wood and that makes it much more difficult to move the wood it can be moved but it takes a lot of extra pressure what you can also do if you're worried about damaging the wood from where these sitting you can use some of the felt pads that we discussed earlier on the corners and just put a small one of those on and that will just soften the any marks that it's going to make on the wood now an alternative method to mounting to the bed is to use what's called ca glue or aerosol activated glue along with something such as masking tape or blue painters tape and i'll show you an example of how to do this now so off camera what i've simply done is put a piece of blue tape onto the bed i've also put a piece of blue tape onto the wood itself we then take the glue and we just apply a small amount to the blue tape on here we take the activator spray and we put a coating of that onto the other piece of blue tape and then simply stick them down to each other now you do have a second or two before this set in case you need to position it and try and get it perfectly aligned for something but it does only take a few seconds for it to set and this is why it's one of my favorite ways of holding material down that should do it and the wood is set the only movement there is the actual movement within the bed itself a few advantages to using this method firstly you'll notice that there's no clamps clamps can often get in the way of when you're cutting because knowing that head is moving around you run the risk of it potentially hitting that it also means that if you're using the full you will need to use the full width of the piece of wood you're cutting you can do because it can go edge to edge and this is especially brilliant when you're trying to use the maximum bed space that you can you can stick a full piece of wood on there it will be held down solid and there is no need to worry about having to get clamps on there or again the head hitting those clamps when you're done and obviously once the machine has finished milling everything that it needs to because it's only held down by painters tape you just simply need to peel one side of it up and it should just lift off the bed there we are we'll see just peel the tape off together you can grip it it leaves no damage it leaves no marks there is a little bit of a mark there and on the bed but that's just the overspray of the activator and that will fade in time and it also means there's no damage to the wood off typically what you might get with using clamps so as i say using blue tape and ca glue is definitely my favorite method for holding things down it's probably also my favorite tip i found out since using my 3018 pro it's simple it's quick it's easy and it also means you can use the maximum amount of space of the piece of wood you're putting on the bed or even the maximum amount of space you've got available on your bed because you don't have to worry about clamps around the edge they're just going back to clamps for a second if you're fortunate enough to have a 3d printer there are lots of variations of things you can print to hold things down like different step wedges in order to hold different types of material down they're all available on thingiverse unfortunately like me not everyone has one there is one other method i'm just going to quickly touch on for holding things down and this is called an mft style worktop it's going to put a picture in the corner so you can see for reference but what this basically is is a top that sits on top of your bed with lots of holes in and you can put pins in this hole to be able to clamp things against horizontally and that means the pressure's going horizontally rather than holding things down vertically there are some advantages to them one you can adjust the pins a bit to hold different shapes and size material quite easily and you can also change things on them quite easily because you just flip the clamp off change to the material edge and flip the clamp back on there are some downsides to using them though one the base is typically quite thick maybe up to an inch so you start to lose some height on where you're actually cutting also because of the way they work and they have to have a clamping mechanism and an edge something to hold on to around the edge you start to lose space of your cutting bend so it's brilliant if you've got small things to cut regularly and you want to change them out quickly but other than that there's not a great deal of advantages to using them so the last thing i want to talk to you about is setup and calibration now typically your machine arrives you build it connect it to your pc and you just get going you don't even think about editing the grbl settings unless there's a problem because well to most of us all those dollar signs and numbers can be quite scary if we don't know what they mean and just give you a bit of background grbl is used to run much bigger machines than this with heavier spindles so what they do by default is keep the settings on the control board quite low for safety reasons it doesn't know that this is a lightweight machine with a lightweight spindle what that does mean for us is we can go into those settings start doing some calibration tests pumping the numbers off and getting the machine running faster smoother and better now there's a company called soundsmart jumitsu and they're one of the top manufacturers of the 3018 pro they've got a user group over on facebook and in that user group is a man called graham bland he's honestly a genius with these machines he spends a lot of time helping people out including personally solving some of the issues i've had with my machine it's also wrote a series of guys directed at beginners such as myself and you guys and in these guides he talks about these different settings how to do the calibration tests and to really get the most out of your machine he's also been kind enough to allow me to share these guides directly with you in the description below is a link to all these guides there'll be some pdfs and some test files in there so you can go through start calibrating your machine and get the most out of yours as well and the reason i'm only talking about them is because there's quite a lot of content in there and various tests to do so i'm going to save that for another episode where we'll run through calibrating your machine from start to finish but just to give you a bit of a taster when i fitted the new control board to my machine a couple of weeks back here is the x-axis traversing at the standard settings now here is the x-axis traversing again after doing ground calibration tests [Music] now straight away you can see not only does it run fast now it also accelerates to that top speed much faster and that's just one setting imagine when you start applying all those settings to the different axis you're just going to get a machine that's really dialed in and working perfectly for you now that's everything in today's episode thank you very much for watching if there's any tips and tricks you want to share with me because i'm still a beginner at the end of the day please let me know in the comments section below i love talking to you all if you enjoyed the video please subscribe and give it a thumbs up and i'll see you all on the next one

Channel: James Dean Designs

Views: 168,600

Keywords: 3018PRO, 3018 pro, 3018 pro CNC, CNC, CNC for beginners, 3018, 3018pro build, 3018 pro assembly, small cnc, desktop cnc, laser cnc, woodworking cnc, woodworking, building 3018, building 3018pro, testcut, test cut, first cut, CNC software, Using 3018, 3018 beginner, 3018pro beginner, cnc enclosure, 3018 tips ticks, cnc tips tricks, cnc help

Id: GpsdNzSu0EM

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020