An Intro to Using Carbide Create Version 7

hey everybody Ken Barnett here in the carbide 3D Studio with a very different video you might notice by the background I'm not staging it entirely I'm sitting here at my desk and I'm getting ready to design something in carbide create many of you when you begin on CNC you have no background and I've discovered this in working with many of our customers some of the first time users that there's a lot of Concepts we could cover in just designing a project no editing no cutting everything not music none of this stuff that's designed to entertain you and your short attention span these days this is designed so that you can learn about how the machine and the software relate how I think about designing a project in the software how I think about the machine while I'm doing that design and how you can improve your making I'm not going to edit this a bunch I'm not I might cut a few things but mainly this is designed to take you through the absolute process of how this works I'm going to have the screen here for my computer I'll pop bump in the screen and screen as we go I'm talking about tools strategies digital tools physical world tools all of these things as we go there's a ton for you to learn here let's get started let's Advance your CNC capability through actually showing you what it is that I do when I'm designing projects here at HQ take it into the software first thing is inside of carbide create I have the pro version of the software it's 120 a year I think it's compelling we have some other videos and things that cover the features that are in it that are are outstanding I believe for the value it's 10 bucks a month I I think it's worth it but in any case I then have the design model and Tool pathing tab up above in the top left along with the basic set of tools remember this is a contextual program so when you click on things you will then get different menu options so pay attention to that as we go first thing click the job setup and that's where you need to start every single project and it starts with accurate measurements so in this case I'm going to put in my stock and I'm not so concerned about the length of my stock because I'm really not going to use the entire one I am concerned very much about the width and the thickness the thickness is the one you really want to nail so a couple of tools that you need to have at your desk if especially if your desk is not in your garage okay a couple of tools you need a tape measure but a tape measure for me that contains both metric as well as Imperial I want both of those things on my tape measure because when I think of large pieces I think in Imperial I think in inches because I grew up in the United States when it gets down to small things for Machining for just determining sizes of features I tend to think of millimeters because it's so much easier so I have one that has both so that I can accurately get the conception in my brain of what it looks like or what that piece is so let's take a couple of measurements here right off with our piece of Walnut that we have here so I'm going to take a measurement across the middle you have to trust me on this that I'm actually doing that and it is going to be 184 millimeters wide so into our software our width is 184 millimeters our height now I'm not so concerned about the height because I'm working with a giant piece of Walnut here I'm just working with a short that I purchased so I figured that I will probably use two feet of it let's say um We're not gonna go further than two feet so here's where the expression editor can be really fun in your height you can put in 24 in and hit equals and it will give you the actual number in millimeters if your file is set into millimeters you can utilize the expression editor throughout the program I'll show you a number of different places that it appears but certainly entering measurements is one where you can do that you can also enter in millimeters in an inches file and it will do the same conversion now we've gotten through our broad measurements how about the thickness how do you measure the thickness you have to have a set of digital calipers they're like 10 or 12 bucks on the internet they're super duper cheap get a pair of these get a few pair of these have them around in your shop in your office wherever and I take a few measurements so I will grab my piece and I will measure it 20.68 20 20.67 I will go again and kind of shake it back and forth 20.8 20.62 so you kind of have to take a a broad average of a few different measurements and take a guess at it it's wood it's not going to space we'll be all right so I'm gonna go with 20.7 and I'll show you later a strategy for making sure that you get through the bottom of your cutout but in any case 20.7 is our starting number we're going to start in the lower left which is where I start 99 of my projects for the tool path zero and remember this is where your end Mill is originating so this is where your nml thinks it starts for the project where your zero is in the software it thinks it is the lower left corner of the way you've set your stock my retract I like to go with three millimeters I keep it fairly low you can have it be higher if you like it just means that some operations particularly a v carve will take much much longer as the machine retracts between those little pieces of a b card so I'm working in millimeters and hardwood shapoko Pro is my option here and I will hit OK so I have this piece here that is now tall and a little bit wide looks a lot like a walnut short right so I want to move into my design now in the upper left there are a variety of design tools and you can choose between what you want depends on what you're making what am I making that's the question right let's try to think of something to make and I wanted something where I'd have to have a number of shapes that we can manipulate and move coins are one of my favorite little projects I like giving them away they're fun to make they're quick you can do a lot of fun design with them they are metal you can make them out of wood too you can make wooden nickels it's up to you so I thought I might make a holder for completed coins like this one here and then some extra coin blanks which is what I have here so I want some Blanks on the side we'll have to have some Pockets we'll also have to orient some spaces for some finished coins something if you were gonna say sell some coins at a local craft fair or display some coins if you were selling them online on Etsy or something coins are a really fun constrained design project you're going to work with in this little framework and just see how many different ways you can get creative with it right on so we want to tray for that I'm going to zoom in here on our stock and we're going to make a walnut tray because Walnut and brass or walnut and copper look very cool let's start with the outer outline of our tray and so we draw a rectangle and we move our rectangle around here to inside of our stock I want to leave a little bit of space on the edges for clamping I don't want to use double-sided tape I want to be able to clamp around the outside of the project let's think about our size here and as it relates to our stock because you not only have to think about the size of your object but you have to think about how that size relates to the piece of stock you're going to cut it out of so let's look at our grid setup I like to keep my grid pretty small at one millimeter two millimeters something like that I'm going to leave it at one millimeter right now and hit okay with this case it's 176 wide right now let's just go 170. and how about a height I don't know 170 84 is pretty close to exactly half of that right go 85 should be a nice proportion and we can position this so that we have room for standard essential clamps that can put their feet right on the edges of this board and we can have some pretty stock standard really easy work holding there's our general outline how about what we want to do overall with our coins and how many we have finished versus how many we have that are unfinished or if we want to have some that are displayed that are all finished coins and we have some other coins that we want to lay there we don't want everything to be flat we'd like some of them to be stood up on end so we have a a row of them somewhere and we have some coins flat elsewhere let's think about our measurements here we take our coin blank then we again are back to our calipers we zero them out and we're going to measure our coin blanks so these coin blanks 31.82 right now that's where we're at 31.82 about 31 millimeters and these are going to be pretty close 31.8 again I know for my work holding with these coins then I can make a 31.8 millimeter circumference and I can press fit coins into there I don't want to press fit anything I want it to be a little bit bigger so I'm going to go say 32.2 and we'll see how that turns out we'll give a little bit of clearance so I'm going to create a circle and we work in radius here so the radius 32.2 figure it out yeah you can do it quick right 16.1 okay I understand but you don't have to do that if you don't want to do the math in your head and type 16.1 as your radius what you can do is type 32.2 divided by 2 equals and it will give you 16.1 here pretty easy because the math is not that hard but when you start dealing in tiny little fractions yeah use the divide by two use the Expression editor so we have our initial horizontal display for our coins let's now look at a vertical display so I would like to make a rectangle back to making a rectangle and I'm thinking on the left hand side we'll put in some coins but now that I think about it I want to go to the right hand side so drag it over to the right we know what our diameter is right our diameter is at 32.2 and so whatever we put in here we would need a diameter sell it like that so our width let's just go 33. we'll leave ourselves a little bit of room height of 72 for now that looks like a good proportion so we have our our little area for vertically stacked coins or blanks let's put out a few of these command C command B controller command you can duplicate items you also have an option to duplicate by bringing up the duplicate menu command or control D you can bring up the duplicate menu for the highlighted Vector that you have you can tell it's Cape groups keep tool pad flakes keep the current layer active we haven't dove into layers just yet so right here we'll just leave all of that with it up we can go ahead and just start clicking and we will be creating duplicates of the vector that we had selected go ahead and hit done I have six of these guys here now arranging things in curb I create can be a little tricky can be really easy it just depends so we're going to grab these two and we're going to align them your alignment tool is on the left hand side about in the middle it's in the middle of the transform selections and anything you hover over will show you what tool it is rotate mirror group align vectors we're going to select the line vectors and right now in the Align vectors we're going to align to the dotted line Vector which is the last Vector you have selected on your screen so what will happen is when we tell it to align centers horizontally this lower one is going to move to meet the upper one you're going to spend a lot of time thinking about which piece is moving because you're going to set pieces in places that you want them that you want them to stay and you're going to want to align other pieces to that you're not going to want to shift over the piece that you've already gotten perfectly placed in your design as your designs get more complicated this will become increasingly important so we're going to align horizontal and you'll see the bottom one moves ever so slightly so these are aligned vertically now we have a couple of options here I could delete all of these and I can simply take these two and I can duplicate them say command D and I can put two more of them down now I know that these are directly above one another the same way that we have aligned our first set command Z command Z to eliminate those command Z to get back to where we were with our previously singularly duplicated items if you want to continue down the road of aligning these vertically you can do that you can then you'll have to align them horizontally as well let me show you a strategy for creating an array of this type of thing more quickly take these two group them so now whenever we select them they are one item let's duplicate them one two we now have three grouped vectors so effectively these are three objects that I can select I know that the distance between these two is the same because I did it in this particular one our original one so now I'm left only to align these three items vertically I'm now horizontally aligned with everything these are vertically aligned with one another and these are now horizontally aligned with one another here's where we need to make a few adjustments so we don't have right now a tool for space evenly you'll see that in some software particularly Adobe Illustrator where you can space evenly from side to side we don't have that right now so you need to create some guides it's not really that hard you're just going to go ahead and create a square and then we'll drag that square up and if I like this distance between the two I can go ahead and resize my Square and you're done and now I can select the square along with our group here on the left and I want to align to the outer edge so now this Square rectangle is aligned to the outer edge of this group here so now I want this group to move to be aligned with the outer edge of this particular Vector here our guide I will select our guide last and I will now move this to a line with the outer edge here like so so these are now evenly spaced apart whatever the distance of this particular rectangle is that we have said in this case six millimeters so it's six millimeters wide why don't we duplicate this piece then we will align it to our current guide vertically just for fun you don't actually have to and then we will take our new guide and we will align it to our middle set of circles it is now aligned with the outer edge of our Center and we can grab our node here and we can align it to the midpoint of our guide so you notice I manually move this right side group that's something you can choose to do or you can use the alignment tools the way we have so these are now six millimeters apart evenly spaced vertically from one another because these three were all the same selection and we duplicated them we now have this little array what if I don't want to look at these guides that I've created this is where you need to use the layers tab hit the L key it'll bring up layers simply add a layer I always have a guides layer hit okay guides in red red is not the best color necessarily let's go with a mustard and I have those two guides selected so I'm going to sell it to move selection to layer you'll notice these are now green and the real advantage to layers is I can show or hide them an item right now they're still there but we don't need to look at them while we're making choices about the rest of our parts if you want to make sure that they move with your parts you can keep them up there for a while and for instance when I grab all of this I can move all of these together but generally speaking I will get rid of guides as I no longer need them and not worry about what their position is later one of the things I do do while I'm working through a project is periodically I will grab all of my vectors and I'll copy them and throw them out to the side I have therefore a version of my project at some earlier points I often change things at the end of a project but I need a middle point in order to more easily change them for the end point that I'm looking for I don't want to have to go and recreate the wheel because sometimes you're making changes to parts of the vectors on here and pieces of your design and we don't have a a tree of previous history it's not parametric modeling so I like to keep little pieces out to the side and you can complain now about how this isn't the way the software should work or I want more or whatever yeah there's other things out there that are more expensive this is how the software Works whether it's this software or somebody else's software you have to figure out how the software works the way it thinks the way you think and the way the machine moves and put all those together doesn't matter what it is you still need to figure these things out so a lot of these strategies are exactly that take your art throw it out to the side once in a while you have unlimited space use it hey future Kevin jumping in here for just a second I want you to watch out when you're copying pasting elements and putting them off to the side as I just recommended you have to be sure that there are not tool paths assigned to those vectors when you copy and paste when you duplicate the tool pads you've already set are going to be applied to any of those elements that you've copied and pasted so you can see this when you zoom out you'll see it in just your regular tool paths and then in your simulation you'll see Rapids and cuts be aware of that look and see if your machine is tracking off to some weird spot if there are extra lines take a look one other note I did rotate this project 90 degrees it made the cut a lot easier it was better positioned on the wood and anytime you can cut with the grain for the majority of your object it's going to work out better so we want to go this Direction with the grain versus across the grain you'll get a lot less twist you'll get a lot less variation in the woods anytime you cut wood especially like a walnut you will release tension in the board if you go with the grain for the majority of your item your item is going to stay straighter a lot more times then it will twist and bow and do all kinds of other weird things remember wood is not a static stable item MDF is it doesn't have any twister warp a walnut beautiful as it is as twist and warp all right back to it I'm going to temporarily group this entire set of vectors here so this will have an effect on our layers I am going to group these vectors and you'll notice now it pulls everything onto the guideslayer don't worry about that too much the reason I grouped them is so that I can align them with the outer gloves cut out or the outer Contour of our part and I'm going to align it vertically now it is exactly aligned vertically I can go back and ungroup everything here and I can grab my three pieces go to the layers panel panel and move the selection to the layer I'm going to rename this layer as a matter of fact our main design name things whether they're layers or tool paths you'll be very happy when you get into complex designs with a lot of features that you named your layers you named your tool paths you named your groups all of this becomes increasingly important as you work all right okay I've now centered this inside of this rectangle let me decide what I want to do with this particular rectangle here I'm going to center it to the outer rectangle because I don't want the outer Vector to move so I'm going to Center that vertically very good and now this guy and decide how far I want it away from here I might want to put in another set of guides so if I take and make a guide here I'm going to make it nine millimeters wide so I have a nine millimeter guide that I want to pull longer here so I can just visually check that all of this is going to line up I'm going to pull this guy pretty long nine millimeters wide okay very good I want to duplicate that and I want to stick it over here and I want it to sit on the edge of my outer Vector so I've aligned these two new pieces which are designed to be guides so I move them to the layer so what I'd like to do now is I'd like to align all of these in their hole to the edge of this guide so I'm going to group them and I'm going to select that guide and then align to the edge now it's nine millimeters from the external edge of my part cutout I want to take this part here I want to do the same thing but I'm going to align to the outer edge on the other side with our align tools in the upper left and hit a live no matter what you're doing inside the software practice is going to be key you're just going to have to make a lot of stuff to remember all of these commands that I'm going through even though I'm going to go through them slowly here they're not all going to stick just practice you got it I want to show you one quick trick with selections and carbide create I didn't know this for a while if I select down it will select any Vector that I wholly put within the selection box watch this I have touched these vectors on the left hand side but I'm not getting them selected I'm only selecting those that are completely within the Box this is not how something like illustrator Works illustrator works that any Vector you touch it selects carbide create has that same ability if you drag a box up now it will grab anything it touched you can see it grab the outer Contour when I went all the way up this time I didn't go all the way up it didn't grab all of them this is a handy tool when you're trying to select say this entire circle but not the two sides yeah you're going to get the group that you are going over but not these two guides but if you go up you get all of them so that's just one of those fun things to remember when you're trying to inside of a complex design select a minute portion of it or maybe a larger group of something then you can go ahead and go up or down don't mind the banging we're making machines here today as we are every day all right let's sort this back out now that we have it vertically aligned Center to our outer contour and we decided we wanted it nine millimeters from The Edge and we did that let's get our three groups here and move them back to the layer upon which they belong move selection to layer hit okay everything's on the layer that it belongs let's get rid of our guides we'll just hide them and now they're gone so here's our basic design and we're just going to have six coins we're going to display them flat and we're going to have a row of coins here on the right let's take a look at our tool path and you know what we want to do with our tool pathing now that we've created this object we want to machine all of these objects how does the program and the Machine think about where things are how do you think about where things are all right this stock that we said at the beginning any area that contains the grid that is the stock that you set up so if I take a look at show simulation I don't have to go to a path let's create a toolbox we'll use current selection we'll cut outside right I'll talk about that in a second let's look at our simulation anytime you have a tool path that's been created you will see your stock there is the piece of stock that it thinks is in the machine you can have it show in any one of several different materials I sometimes find that the contrast in one material is better than another for whatever it is that I'm working on but this is so you can get an idea of what it's going to look like when you produce it I spent a lot of time using the beach I think beach is pretty good and it will show you the tool pads it will show you the Rapids topaz are in green and Tool paths are the actual cutting motions that the machine will be taking to run the bit through the material Rapids are these red guys this is where the machine is taking the cutter and entering the material or going between one entry point or exit point and the next entry point okay so it's picking up and it's going and putting itself in making a cut then it's exiting that cut at some point and going to the beginning of a next cut and entering the material again and beginning the next cut you'll be able to see those and dissect those you can also see the number of cuts it's making and this is being determined by your depth of cut so if you change your depth of cut you'll get a different number of times around a particular vector all right we'll play with that in just a moment let me get out of the simulation let me delete this which we had there just to show you how the stock works and I generally start on the interior of my project and this is because you want to create all of your interior features before you cut it out before you cut out the object you don't want the object loose in space if you're making an entire cutout and maybe using super Woolen blue tape or double-sided tape to hold it there and then trying to feature it and cut it you're going to fling the part you also don't want giant tabs on the side of your project perhaps so even if you're using tabs they're probably not that big because you don't want big marks on your finished product on the outer Contour so you want to make your tabs smaller they're going to be weaker and again you don't want to be putting a bunch of cutting forces into the middle of your project so I like to feature everything on the project first inside all those features get it made then cut it out and if you make your cutout first for purposes of simulation fund we can always reorder the tool paths that's another step that we'll talk about in a little bit or maybe I'll forget and we won't talk about it and you'll have to ask about it in the comments please ask please we're here to help I'm here to help I definitely think you can do it I'm definitely behind you we think this is something that you're really going to enjoy doing all right select our circles how deep do we want to cut our circles well that's going to depend on the thickness of our coins do we want to be able to grab them do we not want to be able to grab them out of the pouches they're going to sit in all right 3.21 yes 3.21 do I want to cut these particular features what if I want to be raised up just a tiny little bit why don't we make some pockets we will use the current selection that is the six circles and you notice it throws in some toolpaths just as we start to Define our tool path with defined toolpath you first have your tool up top then you have the vectors selected which we did before we came into the tool path that's anything highlighted in Orange then we have our start depth which in most cases is zero but in some other cases you're going to be adding to the bottom of a pocket so you want to make a pocket and then a feature within that pocket your depth your starting depth would be equal to the bottom of the pocket you previously cut in this case we're starting from the top of our material we're going to go ahead and just cut down the other significant scenario where you would have a different starting depth is if you wanted to in a single operation put your wood in the machine your stock in the machine and you want to face it off a certain amount and then begin featuring it so let's say I want to take one millimeter off the top of it I would take my one millimeter off and in every cut after that would start from one millimeter because you've already got rid of that amount of material and we go from say one to four millimeters to make a three millimeter deep pocket makes sense hope so here I'm not putting a facing path in we're going to zero our machine to the very top of our stock and we're going to cut from there so I want to cut from the start depth of 0 to a final depth of three millimeters here you can use the Expression editor as well you could put in 0.25 IM and hit equals and it will show you that is 6.35 millimeters but it is a small measurement so that's what I'm working with three millimeters I work in metric and small ramping an option in carbide create Pro extremely handy if you're cutting Hardwoods a ton or if you're cutting metal a ton you you can utilize ramping and it will give you an angle and then from that angle it will determine if it needs to ramp in along a line or if it needs to helically enter the material set up some ramping passes try them out you'll see what I made the angle is the angle of Entry so that angle is coming slowly down or more vertically down and a plunge would be a 90 degree entry that's in standard carbide creators Inc 90 degree entry so here I don't know 15 degrees unnecessary probably for wearing down that it would be fine plunging but we'll use it rest Machining we're not using rest machine that's another fantastic feature inside Pro where you can use small Cutters to create Corners sharper corners and that allows you to hog out material with a larger cutter and save time I'll show you how to set that up in just a minute all right what is our first tool path these are Center Center circles how about that Center circles I didn't edit the tool it had a 1 8. I think that's a pretty good tool for this but we can select our tool inside of the select tool option which is brought up by hitting edit and then it will show you the parameters for your current tool and then going to select tool this opens up a menu which contains all the carbide 3D end mills at any animals you've entered by machine and material then end Mill so for instance we're working on a shape Oco we're going to work in hardwood so I want to pull that drop down open our end mills we're working with the flat end mills not the ball end mills that are standard or the V carve and Mills which we'll get to in a minute we'll get to these let's work with the end mills and let's go up to uh yeah quarter inch I think it's 251 that's a down cut End Mill down cut end mills are really nice for wood that's what you want to use hit okay here are the standard settings for that end Mill standard step over which is equal to one half of the actual End Mill size because a quarter inch End Mill right which we know is 6.35 so we've cut it down step over 3.1 it's going to step over half the size of the End Mill it's going to cut a little more than a millimeter per pass these are conservative calculations we already have pre-programmed our plunge rate is 304 and our feed rate is 1500. the 251 is a two flute End Mill so you don't have three cutting surfaces you only have two cutting surfaces it is a quarter inch End Mill so generally I feel like I can put a little bit deeper I'm going to cut 1.5 deep I'm going to plunge at 550 because I'm going to use ramping so it'll be a little bit easier I'll leave the feed rate the same I'll leave the RPMs the same 18 000. it'll gain Center circles we've selected our tool we know our vectors because we have those at the start we've changed our start depth for we've set our start depth at zero and three and our entry angle is 15 degrees hit okay and there you can see how much more quickly it's going to cut with a quarter inch versus an eighth inch cutter just two minutes what is our our group here let's create our group let's rename it you can call it uh inner features so now we've named our group then we have our first tool path I would name that let's also pocket this tool path here let's say we want to use the same cutter with the same parameters but on this pocket we select the pocket itself right click hit duplicate toolpath we'll call this right side rectangle we'll use the selected vectors which means it will assign the duplicated tool path to this Vector hit OK and you see now it calculates in it's going to use all the same settings from here in terms of depth of cut in terms of the tool and the ramping and applied them here to our right side rectangle see through three millimeters quarter inch tool all the same ramping at 15 degrees okay there we go now here's where I want a duplicate a tool path and use rest Machining check this out so if we go into our simulation we have these Pockets here let's get rid of our tool paths and Rapids you'll notice the edges here of this rectangle are not coming in very sharp those are not at all the way they were drawn so in a circle doesn't matter what size cutter it is that you use right because you're just cutting a circle here you are limited to the radius of the cutter when it comes to Sharp corners the smaller the cutter you use the tighter that radius gets the problem is use a tiny cutter to pocket out this entire area at three millimeters you have to cut a shallower depth of cut and you're cutting a tiny amount of material each time by so I wouldn't want to spend all this time taking what should be a two minute cut and turning it into a 15 minute cut with say a 1 16 inch End Mill so what can I do I've cut it with a quarter inch it was super fast but I want sharper Corners I want these Corners to look nice and sharp here the way they're doing my drawing here's what we can do with no Contours selected right click your right side like a rectangle and duplicate the tool path you cannot use selected vectors because you haven't selected them now I will do this I will hit rest right side rectangle and hit OK it has simply duplicated that toolpath it's changed nothing all I changed was the name go in and edit I'm going to leave all this the same for the moment and I'm going to hit rest machine now previous diameter is critical that's why I didn't change the tool yet it's a quarter inch 6.35 millimeters do I know if that stock setting it came in with is equal to my end Mill that I previously used maybe I don't maybe I used an eighth right maybe this end Mill the tool in the previous cut was an eight I can simply put it in 0.125 i n equals and it will do the math forming in this case it was a quarter inch I can put in 0.25 i n for inches equals 6.350 it's asking you what tool did I use before this operation during this operation you now need to change the tool you're actually going to use so let's go to edit select our tool again we'll be back into shape Oco Hardwood we're going to use an end mill again in this case let's use a 16 a 112 1 16 inch End Mill let's go for some sharp grounds put it okay you can see how different The Cutting parameters are here it's going to cut a half a millimeter it's going to cut much slower and its plunge rate is also equally slow and the step over is tidy because the cutter is Tiny you wouldn't want to cut the entire pocket with it so in this case 1 16 I'm going to change nothing about the settings we already have all of our other parameters established I hit OK and here are the two paths for that particular new toolpath the rest you notice it's only going to cut the corners just along those four corners it's going to come back and recreate them let's take a look at our simulation and there we go sharper Corners there's still a radius of a 16th but that sure beats the radius of a quarter inch so we had much sharper Corners there you cannot do that in regular carbide create you can only do it in carbide create Pro beside our simulation we have yet to cut out the outside of our project let's go let's do that let's create a new tool path group we'll name this group Adder features well out features no outer features now anything we create is going to end up in this tool path grouped we'll select our outer vector and we'll make it a contour we will use current selection we want to cut outside right that one always comes to mind for me right away do I want to cut inside left outside right or no offset that's asking where should the cutter run inside of the vector that you've selected outside of the vector you've selected or directly down the middle of the cutter outside right is for a cut out so you'll see the blue is going to come around it's going to go outside of our chosen size for our Contour around the outside of our object or creating the outside of our object if we go inside left it will run inside of that Contour it's going to make the part smaller you'll make this mistake we all do you don't make that selection properly and you end up with a part that's too small happens to all of us now it's with a 16 inch cutter because that was the last cutter we worked with that is certainly not what we're going to use to cut out our 20 millimeter thick sheet of Walnut reneed a quarter inch cutter and we probably just go right back to the same 251 hit okay I'm going to leave all the parameters as they are now about our thickness we could go back into the setup and look up our thickness because I don't remember it at this point do you down to the millimeters no I never do by this point I remember with some fraction of 20 in this case okay fine expression editor definitely handy type in t is for thickness so you're telling it now I want you to cut to whatever the thickness measurement is that I entered in this job setup at the very start of the program T will take you to that number now let's assume that you did not zero your machine exactly a hundred percent correct let's also assume that even though this is wood that's three sides good it's not exactly that thick all the way through in fact we know that because we pulled in our calipers at the very start then we got a few different readings and we kind of chose a sort of average of that scene Plus 0.1 here's an option where the expression editor really comes in handy you can tell it I want to go to thickness plus 0.1 millimeters for me that generally covers the majority of projects if I zero properly a plus 0.1 will make sure that I get through the bottom of the project in a lot of cases I don't even go through the tape if I'm using double-sided tape on the bottom nothing it just goes right above it you see a nice blue line up here at the bottom of your project that's perfect you might scar your wasteboard with a t plus 0.5 you're going to put a half a millimeter cut into your wasteboard yeah it's a waste board that's what it's for supposed to do that so you can mess with this you can also allows you to create Pockets relative to the bottom of your stock if you wanted to say I want a pocket that is two millimeters from the bottom of my stock you don't have to worry about did I enter the right number is that 18.6 18.5 no you could put in t minus three let's say so now what it will do is cut from the top of the stock to three millimeters above the bottom of the stock it's a great way just to make Pockets that have a defined bottom sometimes you just want to define the bottom of the pocket or the feature not the top down measurement you're worried about the bottom up measurement quick way to do it in this case we're going t plus 0.1 because we're making a cut out we're doing it outside right we've selected our quarter inch End Mill we already had our Vector selected before we're going to use ramping again we're going to do it at 15 degrees we don't have any tabs right now on our project I'll show you that in a second and we'll call this outer Kono a little cat so we have our inner features we have our outer features we have an outer cut out after all of our inner features let's take a look at our simulation and we have a tray here we go we've created a basic tray with some basic shapes now a few things come to mind when you pull up the simulation hey look we duplicated this tool path that we were using for these circles the socket and this pocket ended up three millimeters deep it's not going to hold these coins we need probably half the distance of the coin right or so 16-ish millimeters yeah 16 inch millimeters let's do that lighter simulation could be 16 could be more maybe I want three millimeters on the bottom so let's change this pocket max depth t minus three millimeters and let's take a look at our simulation now we have a pocket that goes all the way down to within three millimeters on the bottom of our stock now one problem we have CRS machine pass here that's not going to work is it and the reason it's still at three millimeters because we haven't changed it but I can tell you this the 16th inch End Mill yeah it's not going to cut down 18 millimeters 17 millimeters not that long so let's get rid of that rest Machining pass when we look at our simulation again and now we have some rounded corners but we have a nice deep pocket so there's a trade-off and you're going to find these trade-offs all the time we know that a 16th inch End Mill only goes a few millimeters in its flute length an eighth inch End Mill it can cut that distance why don't we try that see how that tightens up we'll re-enable and we'll edit we'll select our tool we'll go to shape vocal hardwood and Mills or 102. this will be about the limit of a 102 perhaps well then okay we're again back to getting those little cutouts show our simulation and while they're not as oh look at that we only want three validators hang tight T minus three all right show simulation this is why you need to use simulation because things will need to be altered there we have it nice clean corner so our pocket is now looking like it could actually hold a row of blanks or other coins okay next I want to make some alterations to the outside you notice how sharp these Corners are CNC machines have cut sharp Corners they're no fun let's change that let's cruise back to the design side of carbide create and look at what our options are for that outer outline this outline when you make a rectangle or a square you are given the corners option in the upper left Square fill it chamfer flip fill it Dawn bone and T you can change it to any one of these just to experiment with it just to see what it looks like and then you can change this value here which is the radius okay and I advocate for moving it to extremes so if you want to move it to something wild like a hundred great and you end up with this weird shape but you at least you start to understand what it does chamfer fill it Square let's go fill it and let's just round the edges a little bit two millimeters just to take the sharp edge off of it if we go back to our tool paths we'll look at our simulation that looks a lot better the sharp edges are not nice on products generally so the more you can fill in edges and cut them in the better and on outer edges you're always going to get a sharp corner on inner edges like say I wanted that quarter inch fillet here I could just not worry about it because I would have the quarter inch fillet in there I'm using a quarter inch bit it would only be the radius of that bit and I would be okay with that I didn't have to mess with rest machine or something else this is where you need to know what the cut looks like in person and what the machine can do and put those together in your design ideas you don't have to have everything programmed in some of it can just be you know how it behaves you know what the result will be there's been 100 years plus of Machining with Mills and years ago for I don't know near 100 Years of that 75 85 years of that you didn't have a CNC machine you didn't have a cad draw trying to work off of you didn't have this visualization of the future that you could see you had to know what the tools did so as long as you know what the tools do you can know what the result will be the simulation is a bonus but don't completely absolve yourself of knowing what it's going to be when the Tool actually goes to work the only way you know that is by actually working with the tools making projects making designs try again what if I do this what if I do that what if I apply this tool in that way I encourage you to experiment all right let's take a look back here we've done that on the edges so I'm taking those edges away now sure benches are no fun anywhere where else do you see Sharp edges here you got a sharp edge right along the top edge here a sharp edge here sharp edges here everything's all Sharp chamfers back to design back to our Inner Elements here our inside elements let's select all of those all right now let's use the offset of vectors over here offset vectors we're going to offset inside each one of these vectors and I want to offset 0.9 millimeters why 0.9 well because I know that 0.9 is going to work for my 301 V bit number 301 90 degree B once it has made those lines they're all selected let's go to layers we need to add a layer and we're going to call this our chamfers layer we're going to use the layer for the Machining in just a moment hit okay and well let's use maroon Murray will be slide that'll be good we'll sell it to move selection to layer hit okay and now we have some Maroon lines inside of our black lines which are our main design that are our chamfers we're chamfering the inside of each of these sections and we're going to chamfer the outside we're setting up the lines for this so same operation the offset path but it's going to be 0.9 millimeters outside and apply bring up the layers panel with the L and move selection to layer hit okay great now we have a whole bunch of chamfers out there or chamfer Paz now we have to actually make chamfers back to our tool pads when would we want to make these chamfers my discussion earlier about cutting forces chamfers not a ton of cutting forces chamfers in wood could you cut with the V bit first yes you can I just wouldn't drive it all the way down I would keep my step Downs smaller but you can absolutely run a v-bit into wood as the first cut and then come around and cut the Contour when it comes to metal generally you don't want to do that generally I want to chamfer after the cut not before the cut the other advantage of chamfering after the cut is you're really taking away any of those fuzzies that you left behind any of those chips that welded onto the edge any of the imperfections and you can change the depth you already know what the cut looks like you can play with that but in this case I want to do it first so I'm gonna go to Contour select by layer because I have nothing selected I'm going to select the chamfer layer and you're okay the amount to chamfer is up to your preference and your experience I'm gonna go down one millimeter with a 90 degree bit one millimeter down should create an okay chamfer I'm gonna have no offset we've already created the offset by virtue of the offset path where we put the Contours is where we want the bit to come down so we're going to come down right on that line it's going to be no offset at all we want to ignore tabs because I think we're going to add some tabs here in a second and we don't want it to be picking up and then putting down on our chamfers and we'll call this chamfers all of it we need to edit our bit we will select our tool shape Oco Hardwood V and I'm going to use a 301 90 degree it's one of my favorites kind of a nice mid-century modern look and you know what I'm gonna run it faster it's not around a thousand if I can type it in I'll run it a thousand and a little Plunge at 500 depth per pass now here's where you can set up a really nice finishing pass total depth one millimeter right I want a 0.1 millimeter finishing pass so what should my depth of cut be 0.9 that will create a situation where the cutter will have to go around twice the second one it will be cutting just a tenth of a millimeter just smoothing everything out hit okay I'm gonna pull my chamfers up here above my outer cut out I'm going to cut it first I'm going to show the simulation and I can zoom in and see if we got the intended effect we're not getting any contact between the 90 degree bit and the place that it's running so what do we have to do well we have to create more chamfer depth two millimeters this is why simulation is very good now we look in and look at that we have a definite chamfer around each one of our coins and around the inside of our pockets as well as the outer part of our part that all looks better are we happy with that design are we not happy with that design that's my question maybe I'm not happy with the design let me want to change it in my design dialogue let's make the chamfer layer disappear let's hide it only gonna get these coins up easily how are we going to pry them out of there at all easily if they're in these little insets and it's almost the depth of the coin well I'll tell you it's not going to be easy so what I want to do is create these little guys here so I'm going to create a little cutout a little half circle cut out this means I'd use the Boolean tools but I want everything to look the same let's take a look let's grab this make another one you can put it right on the Node each circle this can consists of a node so if you know that you can actually align Center by the node of what you're working with so you grab the center node of a circle and you add it to the outer node but this bigger Circle and you know that's going to be centered and if it's centered right here this will be all vertically aligned each one of those will be in vertically aligned we can do the same thing down below and we can actually take all three and we'll grab the center one by its Center and we'll hit the node and now all those should also be perfectly aligned we can check it by seeing if these are aligned with one another let's see if they move didn't move we used the alignment did not move we select these two groups we're gonna believe now we're going to Boolean the two groups together blue is going to stay orange is going away how about that that looks pretty good well is going to produce the same this is the inverse that's going to create some tiny little pieces that's not what we want several of these are going to produce different results this is not what we want either we would like the circles contained we would like that outer outline touch okay and just like that we have something that looks a little bit easier to pull coins out of than our previous set of tool paths now you'll notice that our previous set of features you'll notice here that our tool paths have not changed we have tool paths in here for the chamfers that are not correct let's go back out to design we're going to add all of these to our selection what's that chamfers offset path same deal inside 0.9 hit apply layers move selection to layer let's show that layer let's get rid of the old chamfers all those plain circles those are gone so we have chamfers now on those new Vector shapes that we came up with and let's go to our two pads how about this we already have these chamfer lines inside our chamfer tool pack because you're Machining by layer anything you add to that layer automatically is part of that machine function part of that tool pal our Center circles right now isn't cutting anything we're not creating this pocket the way we were before so let's go ahead and select all of these outer pieces and we could have grouped these we could have regrouped them and make it easier let's do that group dropouts Center circles change our vectors this is where you can select the current vectors we can change your vectors you can say use current selection and say okay and just like that there we have returned our pocket tool paths secondly our simulation now we have that new shape being cut out something that'll be a little bit easier to remove the coins from we also have those new chamfers all set up we still have our same rounded Corners here we have our chamfer along the outer Corners we have our chamfer along in this pocket that looks pretty good we had a number of different choices along the way here as it relates to layers and Tool paths duplicating toolpaths duplicating operations how to set up sort of a finishing tool path one thing we don't have so far is tabs now tabs have moved if we select our inner Contour because we don't want to select our chamfer Contour we're going to select our regular Contour here we want to add tabs this is the edit and at edit tabs now you're going to add tabs wherever you want them and it's going to be generic there's no size to these right now there's no indication of depth nor width they're just points at this section in the tool pathing dialog is where you're going to decide how wide or how tall those are going to be those tabs the preset is 12 wide and three tall 12 wides pretty wide I prefer something more like three wide and three tall for something that has a fair amount of cutting force on it you might even go down to two if you're cutting half inch again learning and experience will be keying to your success with tabs holding on to your product properly and not flinging apart if you filling a couple parts you know you're at the edge and it'll happen and okay now let's look at our simulation we've quickly added tabs to what we were doing and now they are appearing width apart that's definitely going to hold our part very nicely inside of our wood we're going to end up with a decent product there is there anything else you want to add maybe maybe not this is version one generally you're gonna do about three versions in real life or IRL if you're one of the kids and you'll have a product that you really like and you're really enjoy whatever it may be this is kind of a silly idea I'm sure you're designing better things out there I guess I'll just take this to the machine and see where it goes I know we're at like an hour but explaining it to you and the first time you do it an hour the next time you do it 40 minutes the third time you do it from scratch half an hour you can start from nothing and Bam Bam Bam lay everything in a half an hour you'll be done all right let's see The Cutting montage and we'll talk about the finished product for just a second but the main part of this video already good [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] back here after making the tray itself I have a few changes already to the tray it's not bad for a first effort it really isn't I think I would definitely store coins flat like this and this width works fine I might create individual Stacks or I might just leave it the way it is and stack a couple more in might be about the same size maybe a touch Less on the width or would be height depending upon how you're looking at it now for these guys I would make these guys slightly larger the radius of here there's a slight variation in the coins so I would give it a little bit more space so they sit neatly within each one of these holes this is a silly item to make it's not really a serious make it was more about telling you what it's like to design something the way that I think about it is everything that I think about contained in there no probably not because each time I make something different I think about a couple more things or I think of a couple things I haven't thought of in a while the main message is keep making things keep making the same thing thing for say two or three iterations so you get used to making changes you get used to refining an item then don't be afraid to make something kind of useless this will stay here in the office I'm sure it'll contain coins for the rest of its days it's not just going in the fireplace so remember that making stuff like this is a fun exercise to improve your skills so that when you go to make something more complex or something you really are proud of or you're going to give as a gift you've built up a bunch of skills on some things where it doesn't matter if it's slightly off it's still usable hope you found some value in this we'll be back in the studio with more information ideas and inspiration

Channel: Carbide 3D

Views: 31,210

Keywords: Carbide3D, CNC, Shapeoko, Carbide Create, Carbide Motion, Technology, Machining, Nomad 883, Nomad CNC, Nomad Pro, Desktop CNC, CNC Router, Digital Fabrication, Nomad 3, CNC Education, Shapeoko 5, CAD, CAM, Learn Carbide Create, carbide create, learn CNC, CNC at home, desktop cnc, benchtop cnc, home cnc, sign making, wood carving, wood, woodworking, carving, creative woodworking, amazing woodworking, education, shop education, woodshop education, woodshop, how to design

Id: 8rsL73WGBbo

Length: 66min 53sec (4013 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023