Carveco Maker: V Bit Inlays

hello and welcome to this vbit inlay tutorial in this tutorial we're going to take a look at a few different ways that you can create inlays by using v bits now for the last few weeks i've been practicing this and trying out a few methods on my machine and this was spurred by a group of guys in the carve cove facebook group who have been doing these and i've never done one so i was quite curious about actually trying this out so i'm using a really small machine so i've actually set a few limitations for myself which is i'm using a really small machine so it's the same smart 3018 machine so quite a small bed size can't take too much of a depth of cut and i can't obviously ramp the cuts up and get it going really really fast also i'm using a 90 degree v-bit now it would be easier if i used a 30 degree let's say 15 60 degree whatever now i could have used one of those but i wanted to use a 90 degree because if i can get this working using a 90 degree v bit i can get it working using any of the others so this is what i'm going to do so you can see that it's two inlays so there's one inlay going over the other now don't worry about that that's really really easy as long as you get the basics down with creating green light you can do one over the other you can do seven over each other it doesn't matter okay so this one i'm going to produce now if i close this and let's open up carveco maker and you can see that's this is just a blank model if i go to tool paths and then down here we have create inlay tool path now don't get confused by this this isn't for doing v-bit inlays this is if you want to use an end mill and what it does it rounds the corners so if you're interested in what this does then i would strongly suggest that you take a look at the carco fundamentals training on the website come down to the tool path section and you'll see that there's an inline video and i'll go into a lot of detail about this and how it rounds the corners now because it runs the corners it's not very good for using the v-bit and the whole point of using the v-bit is to get into some really tight corners and give you nice crisp corners so let me close that now i also recommend that if you're new to carveco maker not to follow along to this video because this is going to be more for intermediate or advanced users i'm already going to assume that you know the basics and i'm not going to create the vectors let's say for instance i'm just going to deal with actually creating the bit inlays so let me close this and open up my model so here you can see that i've got that design and i've got two hearts and i've also got this text now the text at the moment i don't need to do that i don't need to worry about that whatsoever so what i'm going to do is select it right click and i'm going to move that to a new layer so let's open up the vector layers and i'm going to rename that and i'll just call that mommy now if i want to i could give that a different color let's say i want it to be blue okay just so i know that it's on the different layer and i'm going to switch back to the default layout and turn that layer off because i don't need it at the moment so i'm just going to deal with these hearts now to begin with it's very very easy all that you need to do is a v big carving so i can do them both together so let's select all of these go to my tool paths and then select create vb carving tool path what i'm going to do with these is sort of a different method to what people have suggested which is i'm going to let these go the full depth okay and i'm also going to use the bevel carving rather than the v-bit carving to do the male insert for these so for this let's select a carving tool so i'm going to use let's say this one here which is my 90 degree v-bit and then click refresh now this is important because i need to know what the maximum depth is so it's going to be 0.13376 so i'm going to write that down now if you want to you could round that up by limiting it to a maximum depth and just enter your maximum depth it's entirely up to you i'm just going to let this go the full depth so if i click to define the material let's say that it's half an inch thick my model position is at the top so obviously set this up wherever your cnc is set up select okay and then what i'm going to do is calculate now and then i can close that and let's take a simulation of this so if we rotate around move that out the way and play okay now if i double click on that i can see here that this looks a bit jaggedy now the reason for that is because my tolerance for some reason it's gone back to 0.025 inches that's not the default tolerance the default tolerance is one fail so if i calculate that again and just delete that and i simulate that again it should be look a lot better okay so that's all good all that i need to do now is save that out and send it to my machine to cut now this isn't a problem on my machine it doesn't take very long to machine this because the v bits just going straight down to a depth okay so this is a video of the heartbeat machined so you can see that i've got quite a small area to play with and this video is massively sped up so i'm just going around cutting the hearts using the v bit and it doesn't really take that long to do the female okay so with the female done i can delete this tool path obviously save it before doing this delete that tool path and what i'm going to do is the left hand heart i'm going to split these up onto different layers just so i don't get mixed up so the left hand heart i'm going to move that to a new layer i'm going to call that left heart the right one right click move to a new layer and i'm going to call that right heart and then i'm going to turn that right heart off and then make sure that i select the left heart if i put that in the center of the model my origin or my datum is in the center and if i want to i can rotate this around just so it looks as though it's all aligned so let me go to transform let's rotate that around i'll just do this freehand like so okay so that's rotated around this is the left-hand heart now importantly this is a mistake that i would say that most people who've done inlays have made i made the mistake also and cut my first heart saves and i forgot to do this which is mirror the part if you don't mirror it when you've cut the part 8 and you flip it over it won't be in the correct orientation so it just won't fit so whenever you do the mail you need to make sure that you mirror it now i thought that i would get away with these hearts because i thought they would be symmetrical but they're not there's there's a slight variation so i spent hours machining something and it didn't fit so make sure that you mirror the mail so to do that really really easy go over to mirror objects and then what you want to do is go center and i'll turn off copy if you go center it's mirrored over now it's more obvious on text this looks a little bit symmetrical so you can't really tell but you'll see later so that's my left heart and what i want to do first of all is explain that i'm doing it a different method to what you would see on the internet and a lot of people actually telling you how to do these so the first method i like it because it saves me time on the machine and it's really really quick the only drawback with that is that it's only really good for single piece objects because otherwise let's say that i was doing a sentence it would cut each piece out and let's say that it was a long sentence when you actually glue it together you would need like about 50 clamps or something to actually glue it together so that's just not practical so the only time that i would do this is really when there's just one or two pieces that i can glue in there okay so what i'm going to do is just use these two vectors so i don't need to do any offsets or anything i'm just going to use these two vectors and what i'm going to do is create a bevel carving tool path so the bevel carving tool path is just the opposite of creating a v bit carving tool path so let's select my tool so again make sure that you select the same tool so i've got a 90 degree v bit now obviously if i had a smaller angle on there i would be able to get down deeper and it would give me more to actually glue onto but i'm not bothered about that i've got it working using the 90 degree v bit and i'm happy with it if i go down and use 60 degree 30 degree then great it will give me more area that i can glue down but i've got it working with a 90 degree so i'm i'm not too fussed about that right so what i'm going to do is click center line if i click the center line it should give me the exact height of what the depth was when i created the vb carving so if i click that you can see that it's given me pretty much within a few 0.134 inches so that tells you basically the height of this that it wants to be so if i set up my material which is half an inch the finished depth it wants to go half an inch so i'm just going to play around with this just to show you what actually happens so if i calculate that and let's rotate rare and and i'm just going to simulate this so you can see so what's happening here is that it's creating the v that i want but the v bits going right the way down to the bottom of the material so if i rotate to rounds see how the v bits going right the way down to the bottom of the material i don't really want that i want this v to be at the top of the material so if i were to change let's say the wall height to let's try 0.25 now what this is going to do it's going to tell me that i need a profiling tool to cut it out afterwards so if i select calculate it says cannot calculate for the following reasons you must choose a profiling tool basically to machine the wall so let's select a tool and the tool that i used was this 1 8 of an inch science maths tool so click that and i'm going to calculate it so let's delete the simulation again and then let's simulate that so now you can see that it's moved this upwards and then it's got a flat wall now this is really really good because it just means that you just need to do one cut around the edge one cuts around the inside and then cut the part out and it's a lot faster than using the area clearance or using the v beat to do an area clearance which takes a really really long time but sometimes you have to do that and i'll show you how to do it in a moment so this is a really really quick method now the only problem with this is at the moment it's going a bit too deep now it doesn't really matter since the maximum depth of this v down here will be the maximum width of the female that you created a moment ago so this doesn't really matter but i want it to be on the top i don't want it to be all the way down there so to do that what we need to do is take off the 0.134 let's say from half an inch so i've got 0.366 so if i were to set that to 0.366 and then calculate that again this is basically saying that there's not enough height now this means that there's going to be a flat on the top now i'm pretty sure that it's only going to be a fair or so for this because i've taken the maximum height away from the finished depth so i'm going to click yes and then let's resimulate that so if i rotate around now you can see that the bevel is on the top of the material if i zoom in you can see that there's just a small section that's flat there now if i were to actually machine this and try to place that into the female this would be pretty much size on size and i don't really want that because i need somewhere for the glue to go so you need to have a little bit of an area underneath is that the glue can go and then he can put it so if you make this wall height larger than 0.366 then it will add whatever that is as a flat so let's say that i want it to be 0.4 and then calculate it would give me the same warning message saying that it's going to be truncated now as i said it just means that there's going to be a flat on the top which is exactly what we want because when we fit the part in i need that area underneath it so now if i delete that simulation and simulate again you can see that i've got this flat now that's perfect so that will fit into the female that i've created now if you want to make the flats larger let's say 0.45 it doesn't really matter what you use you just need to be aware of how much wall that you've got on there now the good thing about this is that this is actually how it looks so this is how it's going to fit into the female i know that this is the exact size so i know how much of this wall's going into the female so if i calculate that there and say yes and then delete the simulation and simulate that again now you can see that there's only a little bit of the sidewall so i've probably gone a bit too far there so i'm going to bring that back let's say let's bring it back to 0.4 and calculate so if i delete that and simulate again you can see that i've got my flat so you can just tweak these but as long as you got a bit of a flat there and there's somewhere for the glue to actually go then you're going to be all good now the drawback with doing this is that this is exactly the size that you want so if for any reason that it's not cutting correctly let's say the beds out of square or something then you may have little gaps so maybe you haven't clamped it perfectly you may have a little gap around the edge so on the next task i'll show you a different way to do it so you can add more of an angle onto this but what we need to do is cut this out now if i were to cut this edge on my machine this would be flying all over the place so the good thing about doing this also is that you can add bridges so if i add bridges and let's say i'm going to do a quarter of an inch thickness let's say 0.1 inches let's do 2d bridges and select add now if i turn on my vectors this is something that you need to watch out for if you try to do this and select add what it's done it's actually added these to the center line because i've still got the center line selected so what i'm going to do is just turn off those let's delete the simulation and make sure that you select the outside edges okay so if you've still got this center line on there it will select the center line and it won't create any bridges so let's select add and it creates these bridges now to be completely honest with you i'm i don't care where these tabs are or bridges are so i'm just going to calculate select yes let's simulate it again okay and you can see that it's left all these tabs on now the reason i'm not bothered about that is because when this is turned over and flipped over i can just cut these out just using a knife and i don't really care about the back edge of this because this is all going to be machined back down and i've got lots to machine off there anyway so i'm not too fussed about that so let's machine this so here you can see it's doing two cuts for the v bit now this is the reason that i like doing this rather than using the vb carving and letting that do an area clearance this just comes straight down to the depth that you want it to do and it saves so much time with machining now if you've got a fast machine then you could just do the method that pretty much everyone does which i'm going to show you in a moment so that's the v bit carving and then just cutting the parties so this just going straight down to a depth it saves me having to do an area clearance which takes quite a long time when you're using a really small tool okay so that's finished let's lift it up let's take a look if it's cut through okay perfect so i can just clean that up cut it out and then we'll see in a moment what it looks like in the female okay so let me close that bevel carving and i'm going to delete the simulation and i'm going to leave the bevel carving and i'm going to use the same tool path on the right heart now so if i take a plan view and i'm going to right click on right heart on the the light bulb turn on my vectors and you can see that i've still got my tool paths here let's turn those off and i'm going to select that right heart press f9 to put that in the center let's transform it around like we did before like so importantly i haven't done it on this one needs a mirror so i'm going to go center now this is entirely optional what you can do is make the bevel come down further so when you actually glue it in it's not at the exact point so to do that if you're using a tool other than a 90 degree then you'll have to work it out with a bit of trigonometry now it's very very easy here you can see that i've worked it all out for a 30 degree vb so whatever the depth that you want to make it larger all that you need to do is do tan whatever the degree of the tool is so here i've got a 60 degree v bit so 30 aside so 10 30 times by the depth that you want to go deeper which is in this case 1 8 of an inch and that works out to be 0.0722 inches so that's how much you've got to offset it with a 30 degree tool then it would be 10 15 times by the depth that you would want to basically go down deeper so if it's let's say a quarter of an inch that you want it to go down deeper 10 15 times a quarter of an inch and that will give you the answer so it's always the same formula it's pretty easy once you get the angle of it and you just know that you've got to use ton to work it out with a 90 degree vb it's really easy because whatever i offset it it will come down by that distance so if i select both of these and select offset and i'm going to do it by let's say 80 fair or two millimeters select offset and it creates that offset so now if i open up the same bevel carving tool path and i'm going to select that one and that one click center line and you can see that the maximum height now is 0.225 so let me just calculate this for the time being let's just see what it does so let me stimulate the tool path and you can see that it's done the same thing but it's given me a larger flat and you can see that it's wider so what i need to do is rather than have this wall height what i can do now is take the 0.225 off 0.5 so if i were to make it let's say 0.3 and then calculate you can see that i've just got this small amount of flat okay and this is a lot wider so if i were to make it say 0.35 so this is going down a little bit deeper than it did before delete that and simulate again so you can see that it's added the flat and it's a lot wider now if i take a plan view of this and let's turn off that tool path and turn on my vectors so you can see here these two lines are the original lines that i created so you can see that it's coming past and you can see that it's making a much wider bevel on there so when i actually glue this into the piece you'd be able to see actually come out of the piece rather than the previous one that we've done the left left-handed one which would just stop at the width of the female and then just come straight out okay so let's make sure that we've got the bridges on here so it's done exactly the same thing before as before i've selected the center line so that's something that you need to watch out for and i'm going to select add and then calculate again so let's delete the simulation and let's simulate that okay so that's all good to go and i can send that to the machine and start machining so here you can see doing the v bit you can see that it's left a little bit more of a flat on the top of there so if i just clean this up and take a look at it you see it's gone through the material and you can see that there's a little bit more of a bevel now you can see with both of those in there that the left-handed one is pretty much flush with the top of face of of the chopping board the right handed one you can see there's a gap underneath the reason being is that this one comes out a little bit further so if there's any discrepancies with let's say when you actually cut the chopping board or chop the female then this comes out a bit further and you'll get away with any discrepancies so this is just machining the back off of the hearts once they're all glued down so just clamp them all up glue them down and then just machine the backs off both of them now this takes quite a while on this particular machine because i'm using quite a small tool and i can't set the feed right too high now also i've not leveled the bed so i haven't got a wise board on here and the bed's not perfectly flat so what i've had to do is come down as far as i can then just sand the rest off okay so that's one way to do it so using bevel carving tool path now this isn't really that good if you're doing let's say text or something so if i were to delete this let's delete the bevel carving as well and i'm going to go onto my text layer so let's turn that on okay so now i'm going to machine this by using a v bit carving tool path so create vb carving tool path and i'm going to click to select a carving tool so let's use this 90 degree vb carving tool click refresh now you can see here that the maximum depth that it wants to go to is point one eight inches now let's say that i don't want it to go down this deep i just want it to be at a set distance now if you had a less of an angled tool so say 60 degree 30 degree whatever then the maximum depth would be a lot lower because the tool would be able to get in there so because i'm using the 90 degree it's not really going in that much but i'm not too fussed about it what i'm going to do though is limit the tool to a maximum depth and i'm going to give the maximum depth of this 0.15 inches and i'm going to write that down because i'm going to need it in a moment when i do the mail or the plug now i'm going to use a roughing tool for this as well so i can just get rid of most of this material so if click roughing tool let's use my 1 8 of an inch same smart tool and what i'm also going to do with this is add a little bit of allowance so i'm going to do that at .02 so i'm leaving half a millimeter on there so if i click calculate now and then let's simulate let's say the roughing okay so that gets rid of a bit of material and then simulate the v bit now you can see that it's left this area here standing probe so i'm not really too fussed about it because it's probably not going to be high enough because the part that i want to fit in there isn't going to fit in that bit anyway but let's just sort it out so if i go to the 90 degree and you can see that that's caused by the step over so let's make it let's say about 10 and calculate it so if i delete that simulation and then simulate the vb carving okay and you can see that it's stepping over and it's scoring all of that now i'm not too fussed about the finish on there because no one's going to see it anyway okay so that's the female done and what i need to do now is save that send it to the machine and get it machined so here you can see it's roughing out all of the portions that it can get into and then finally doing the v big carving now to do the females of these it's really really easy there's no hard work in those whatsoever and you can see that i'm actually doing a female and this inlay is going over the top of another inline so literally approach it exactly the same way so once this is done the first inlay you can just do another in line and just machine it over the top of it so so yeah the m there is going through these hearts okay so that's what it looks like when i take it off the machine and you can see that i've actually added a little bit more of a flat here and the text must have been a little bit wider when i actually done this so onto the male or the plug that fits into this so if i delete the simulation and i'm going to delete the v bit carving now i need to make sure that i've still got my size right there which is 0.15 that's how deep this is going so let's delete that turn on the vectors let's take a plan view now what i'm going to do with these because i'm just cutting it out of another piece of wood is i'm going to press f9 put that in the center and i'm going to flip that over so i need to mirror this so this is where you actually see the difference so if i go center you can see that it's mirrored it so now what i need to do to create this i'm going to show you what not to do okay so this will take ages it would take me hours and hours to machine this so if i draw the box around that and then i'm going to select all of this and i'm going to do a v bit carving tool path now this works but it's going to take a long time to do it so create a v big carving tool path and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn off limit tool to maximum depth for a moment select a carving tool so i'm going to use my 90 degree v bit and i'm going to click refresh now this is going to be huge so this is going to be a maximum depth of who knows so maximum depth of almost one inch okay now let's say my material let's set that up again let's say it's three quarters of an inch select okay now obviously that's going to go through so i need to limit this to a maximum depth now if i were to set the maximum depth to let's say 0.5 and calculate it simply like that let's take a look what does this do okay so it gives me that now if i take a plan view of that turn on the vectors you can see what's happening is that it's creating pretty much what i want but the trouble is that the size here is the same size or the width here is the same size as what's on the female so it's not going to fit so what we need to do is drop this size down a little bit now the way that you can do that is to add the start depth so if i were to add the start depth of let's say 0.05 inches and click calculate and then let's delete that and simulate it and what it's done it's taken more off the wall now i appreciate that this is really really hard to see especially when you're just doing stuff in 2d and actually see it but if you set this start that it takes more off the wall now the maximum depth is obviously the maximum that you want it to go to now you don't need it to go that deep you just need it to go deeper just slightly than what you set it in the female so in the female it was 0.15 now what we can do here is have the maximum depth at 0.15 now what this does it actually adds the start depth onto the maximum depth okay so even though it says maximum depth is 0.15 the overall depth and the actual maximum depth is 0.2 okay so if i were to calculate that now and then delete the simulation let's take a look at it again okay so it's only coming down so far now obviously i don't want all of these beats so what i would do is add a roughing tool click calculate let's delete the simulation and simulate again now one thing to watch out for is once you set this roughing tool allowance it stays like it okay so the flat that you've got here that's basically where it's taking off more material so this doesn't look like the female because the female came straight down to a point on all of these areas here except for the bottom of the m so if you've got that flat on there you know that it's going to fit in there and you're going to be able to glue it in there now all that you need to do is make sure that you've got your maximum depth now you can set it you can see that i've got the maximum depth as 0.15 and i've got a 0.05 start depth so the overall depth is going to be 0.2 so that's 0.05 longer or larger than the depth of the femur if you want it to be even more then you just change your maximum depth so if i were to set that to 0.2 and then calculate delete the simulation let's simulate again okay and there you can see that it's coming out a bit more now don't worry too much about this this is what's been left on by the roughing on there so if i were to make that smaller let's say left five there on there and calculate it and then simulate again you can see that i've got less in there now as you can see this tool path is going to take absolutely ages for me personally and that's why i like to do the bevel carving because this area clearance here let me delete the simulation and let's close that and i'm just going to turn on that light bulb this area clearance here is going to take me absolutely ages this is going to take me errors and errors so what i would tend to do is offset the vectors so to do that let's take a plan view turn off the tool paths turn on the vectors again and then i don't want to use that let's delete it i want to select all of those and offset now i can offset a specific distance what i'm going to do is just grab them and i want to make them all as one entity sort of like that so let's close that and then what i can do is let's delete that i'll just let it machine inside here select all of those refresh so the maximum depth now is only 0.21 anyway so if i calculate that then and then let's simulate the roughing you can see that it's a much shorter tool path it's going to take me a lot less time than it did before so let's simulate that tool path see that's the roughing and then let's simulate the finishing okay so that's going all the way around there now what i can do is cut the part out so if i close that take a plan view turn on the vectors now you can see these vectors just want to reiterate that this is inside so that's because of the start depth if i didn't have start depth set this flap would be coming out to the edges okay so you can see that it's taking a bit more off now what i need to do is cut this out but i need it to follow this path around here and i'm not really going to be able to do it because when i try to fit this into the other half if i've got any bits that are sticking up it's not going to fit so what i need to do is actually offset this a little bit more and do the area clearance on that so if i were to select that and then offset again i'm going to make it about there now i know that some of this will be wasted machining so one of the reasons i don't like doing it this way but just showing you different ways that you can do this so if i don't select that outside or the middle one that i've got there and select the outside and calculate that now and then let's simulate this so you can see that's the roughing simulate this that's the finishing and then what i'm going to do is turn on the vectors again let's turn off the tool paths and i'm going to use this as basically my cutters now what i need to do is if i zoom in and hover the maze over the edge of this and if i hover it over there if you take a look down the bottom right hand side of the screen you see a z height so the z height for this is minus 0.21 now you need to make sure that that is correct so as long as it's over what the v bar is which is 0.15 then you're going to be alright so just make sure that you don't cut this out and actually cut it out and not leave enough of the angle on there to actually fit so let's cut this out now so i'll just use the same tool do a 2d profile finish that 0.75 let's go outside select a tool choose my 1 8 tool and i can add some bridges to this if i want to let's add i'm not really fussed where they are because as before i'm just going to cut them at the back now it may be that one there i might want to move so let's edit that let's just move it around maybe rent that in okay and apply and then i can just calculate that so let's simulate that as well so there you can see it's cut it out okay so when that's cut out you can fit it in so let me show you that machines what i actually done so here you can see all the roughing i've done this side of a bit of hardwood flooring that i had lying around so and then you got the vb going around cleaning here all up now this still takes a little while on this machine especially as it's machining inside the back and i don't really need to machine the back so then finally just cutting the party so taking it off the machine see it's cut right the way through you can see here that it's just sticking out just slightly i just need to glue this up now and then wait for it to dry out and then i can get it back on the machine probably overdone it with the glue here but better to be safe than sorry and then once it's dried i can just do an area clearance going around the whole thing just to bring it down now as i said before my machine's not flat so i could only come down so far and then i had to sand the rest on but then once you have done that you'll be left with a nice looking inlay now as i said before don't worry about an inlay going over the top of another inlay it doesn't really matter so you could have an inlay within an inlay within an inlay if you like all that you need to do is do one inlay at the time now one thing that i forgot to mention is when you do this v bit carving on the male the start depth here now because you you're telling carvco maker that your start depth is .05 it will automatically plunge down to this point and think that this is okay so your first cut is going to be .05 plus whatever your step down is so just bear that in mind so this was a little bit hard for me on my machine because that first cut and the step down was really really quite a large cut for me so i had to slow the machine right then hopefully he went through it okay so that's just one thing to bear in mind if you've got a faster larger machine then not to worry about it just make sure that you know that it's going to go a bit deeper on that first cut so what people tend to do the sizes that they tend to use are normally start depth 0.05 just to take it in a touch and then the maximum depth you can set that to pretty much whatever you like really it just depends on how deep you actually want it to be as long as it's touching on the sides and you've got something to actually glue onto then you can pretty much use any sort of size that you want so i hope that you found this tutorial useful i hope that i didn't go off on too many tangents and hopefully we'll see some really nice v bit inlays coming soon okay then cheers take care bye

Channel: Carveco

Views: 4,995

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Id: 9Vo2kIQrww8

Length: 53min 40sec (3220 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021