D07 - VCarve Inlay Technique

in this tutorial we're going to look at the V inlay technique this is an alternative to making conventional pockets in inlays that uses a V bit tool rather than the usual n mil or slot drill to cut these shapes out now the reason this is significant is that by using a V bit tool to create the inlays we're not limited by the normal radius problem that you get from a rotating tool so even in this artwork we've got here which comes the sharp points and quite quick sharp corners here you are able to get keep this detail so if we were trying to just pocket this shape out firstly we'd have to find an end mill which would fit all the way along the length of this pocket which would mean it would have to be extremely fine and secondly even if we could do that we would find that we'd have radii on each of these corners as the N will can't get into the the corners have properly clear the material however with the V inlay technique we can achieve this so we can take this sort of artwork and produce an exactly matching dark wood inlay as you can see in this example so how is this done well in essence what we're going to do is cut two parts we're going to cut the male inlay part from a sir from a dark wood material and then the the pocket out of the light material from a completely different piece of wood but we're going to use the same artwork in each case so that we end up with one example the dark material is actually raised so what we've done is use the V bit toolpath but we've carved away all of the material around outside of our artwork and for the pocket we've just V bit carved all the material inside the artwork so what you end up with is a matching male and female inlay and pocket which we can now put together and glue so we glue these two parts rotate this one round on top of this one and glue it into sits you and so that the the male parts here are all now completely recessed into their matching pockets and then having done that we can cut back the top surface again so you're only left with the matching parts actually recessed into the pocket so we were to essentially either saw this top piece off or skim it back with our machine tool suit to leave a single surface at the end but crucially as I said at the beginning of this we're now find that we've managed to maintain the sharp discontinuities in our original design because the v-bit tool has allowed the inlet actively to get shallower there but maintained just with the tip of the tool the sharp profile of the original artwork okay so let's go on now and look at how these two tool paths were made okay so we're going to start by creating a completely new file so I click create new file here we're going to make this just six inches by three and a half inches and a material thickness of about half an inch I've set the Z zero to be at the top of our block here and the datum for machining will be the bottom left hand corner and we're going to work in inches so that's all okay so I click that and we've now got our working area so the first thing we want to do is bring in our source artwork so this is the bitmap that we're going to use as the basis of our design so in the tutorials folder here I have the hummingbird jpg I can actually simply drag that from Windows Explorer directly into the software like so and as soon as I do that and let go of it it will be imported for me so that's a quick way of importing artwork you can of course also bring the artwork in by using the import button up here on the drawing tab but it's very convenient to just drag things in like that so now I've got two if I just simply click on this once it becomes selected if I click on it twice I get the usual things that you get in all the 2d drawing commands in the software which is the ability now to transform or move around this this drawing element so I can drag it around and I can also resize it with these white handles in the corner so I can resize it dynamically like so and position it just by eye or what I can do is use all of the standard transform tools here on the bitmap so this one is to set the selected object size so if I click that I can actually put in a precise value so in this case what I'm going to do is ask for a width of exactly 4.5 inches four and a half inches because I've got the link x1 I selected here the software automatically fills in the height for me to keep the image in proportion so I can apply that change and now I have my drawing and I know it's exactly four and a half inches across so close that down the next thing want to do is send to this exactly in my material that I created at the beginning so there's various ways of doing this but the quickest way the shortcut key for this rather than going to the align objects command on the drawing tab here is to press f9 so the function nine key and that moves the selected object at the center of my design okay so that's the first thing I've got so I now have a bitmap drawing so this means that the picture is made up of lots of these little pixel elements what we really need to do to create our tool path is to generate a vector outline that matches this drawing and to do that we use the tool on the drawing tab called bitmap trace or trace bitmap here when I select that with my bitmap highlighted I get the options here to start to isolate areas of my image to which I'm going to fit my vectors it's a black and white image so I can use the black and white option here and only worry about finding that the point I want along the sort of gray scales here as I slide this you can see that it's taking either more or less of the gray colors in including them in the area that we're going to fit to around about 80 percent looks good to me so that's a nice area now I can choose how tightly to fit my vectors so essentially this means that tight we'll try and pick up every single tiny undulation in the boundary often that is not what we want because the bitmap has often got essentially noise in it so it's it's got rough edges because of the nature of the scan or the way that the image has been captured rather than because it really represents the true shape so setting this value will allow you to either have a looser fit in other words smoother curves going around this shape whether you want to pick up every single pixel change here I've got it set to 80% but if I click preview I can keep changing these options and click preview again until I get see basically what I'm after and in this case actually I loose fits pretty pretty good it's smooth things out quite nicely and that's going to be a reasonable job I think for what we're after the noise filter if we had a picture which had lots of speckles odd pixels here and there around the edges which can be common if you've used the flatbed image scanner to get your image in then the pixel filter asks it essentially to ignore one or two pixels up to ten pixels here at the top and then the bitmap fading allows me to adjust how bright my original bitmap appears while I'm doing the fitting so obviously by fading it a lot I get to see more clearly the boundaries as they're being created with the preview button so I've previewed it and I'm happy with the preview so I need to keep the preview now I'm happy that once I click apply and then I can close and I've still got my vectors boundary boundaries here okay so the next thing I want to do now is we've essentially finished with the bitmap we're not going to be using that anymore now that we've created the more accurate machining boundaries in vector form so I go across the layers tab here click layers and I can see that there is automatically an extra layer being created for me when I brought the bitmap in so as soon as you import a bitmap image the software will generate a layer for you by default called the bitmap layer and that's quite convenient we can just turn that off and the bitmap image which is on that layer is now hidden from view so it's still there we can bring it back whenever we like but essentially we can hide it now for the rest of the process because we won't be needing it everything else we're doing is focused on layer 1 but because I know in a minute we're going to be creating more artwork I'm going to rename this layer now so we can keep track of it and we know that this is the artwork that I'm going to use to make the pocket so as you'll just call this layer pocket and that will help later on with organizing things and that's all we need to do for the layers really this is all the artwork preparation that's required so the next thing we're going to do is move across now and look at the tool paths because things generally do seem to be split often when you're doing designs between the design process and the tool pathing although both bits of interface are always available if you use this the little tabs on the side here it's convenient when you know you're going to be focusing on tool paths to switch to a tool paths kind of layout and we can do that automatically with the switch to tool paths tab command here on the drawing tab if I click that it hides the drawing and the modeling tab for layers tab sorry for me and instead we'll focus on the toolpath tab which becomes pinned out so as usual when you're machining you need to just check your material setup here is what you expect and also it's worth pointing out at this point that's if you're going to actually go along with this tutorial all the way through to machining the result do make sure that the settings are appropriate for your machine tool and similarly when we start to create the tool pad strategies make sure that the tooling is appropriate for the material that you're going to cut the mesh the machine that you're using and the tools that you in fact have okay so the material setups fine I've got reasonable Rapids Ed's and home position there so next thing we need to do is just go into our V carve engraving tool path here so I'm going to open that tool path strategy op I'm going to select all of the vectors I can just do with box select there and let's take a look at what we're going to cut here so we can actually do our V bit cutting straight away we can limit the depth that we're going to cut to we don't really want to keep carving all the way down sort of infinite depth here so I'm going to just use a point two of an inch as my depth of cut I'm using a fairly large one and a quarter-inch 90 degree tool here if we have a look at the the options in your V bit stores a 90 degrees pretty good mine's a really big 90 degree tool but that will chunk away the material quite happily because it comes to a complete point even with a large V bit tool you can actually produce quite detailed work because we just withdraw the tool so only the tip is used okay so that's good I'm going to also because we got some areas here where it would be quite inefficient to scratch away the material with my V bit tool I'm going to use a second end mill to do a lot of the area clearance if possible so a little 8 inch end mill here and I've got this use flat area clearance tool where possible selected ok and so if I have a look at that it's a fairly conventional setup from the tool database defaults there but what it means is when I come to calculate this and let's call this one pocket we will actually get little bits of area where we can using a an end mil so what we end up with here is two toolpaths in fact the V bit which you would expect obviously but also the secondary one with brackets pocket after it which is the end mil part of the process and if we preview those we can see the pocketing first so it just gets a little bit of the material away with that and then the V bit now using that pocketing will become more apparent when we do the male part of this process but having said that at once we'll be able to reuse it as you'll see in a second okay so that's essentially that is the basically that is the pocket part of our process done as quickly as that so we can at this stage save our model off and we could even export the first part the toolpath and get that running while we start to work on the male part of our process if we wanted to okay so I've got these saved as pocket we've got a layer which we've call pocket the next thing we're going to do is go on to make the male part of the design okay so I finished with my tool prepping for the moment we're going to just change the design around a little bit and add some more geometry for the inlay male part of the design so I'm going to use the sort of reverse switch option here on the tool path tab which switches us back to focus on drawing operations and just dump into the tool path for us conveniently and I'm going to go back up to the 2d view so that we can look at the artwork okay so the first thing I want to do is I'm going to make a copy of this artwork but move it to our new layer so I'm going to go to my layers tab here add a new layer which we're going to call the inlay and what I want to do is take a copy of these existing vectors and move them on to so I can copy to my new inlay layer so I've selected them and now I'm copying them to the inlay layer and you can see a little bit there that you've we've now got to lots of overlapping vectors and when I uncheck pocket we just see the selection in the inlay so I've hidden now the bitmap and the in and the pocket vectors and we're just looking at a copy of the original vectors which is now called on the inlay layer and I'm going back to my drawing tab and what I'm going to do is have to mirror it because if you imagine one of the things we're going to do when we roll over the top part of our design to glue it into the female pocket we've created it needs to be a mirror image because essentially it will be the bottom surface of the male inlay part that we'll have to mesh with the top surface of the female part so effectively they're a mirror image of one another so that's the third first thing we're going to do so with my layer my inlay layer selected here I'm going to go to the mirror tools I'm going to flip about the Jobcentre so I'm going to keep everything centered around the middle and flip horizontally okay and now it's more easy to see with the layers what we've done here so we've got two copies which are mirror images of one another if I just flick on and off the pocket layer make sure we focus on the inlay layer so it's visible and it's also bold that means that's the one we're working on the next thing I need to do is what we'd like of course with the pocket we machined away the inside of these vectors for the male inlay we want to machine away everything except these the area inside these vectors and the way we do that is very simple really we just draw a box larger than our material area here and now when we select both the box and the internal vectors the area that will effectively be machined will be everywhere between the outside box boundary and our vectors on the middle there so that's what we need to do so having drawn a box we can now go back and start thinking about the male inlay part of the tool path now we're going to focus on the male in later path I'm going to use the same button again to switch the tool path tab so that's a convenient way of setting up our view for tool pathing but what I'm going to do rather than go through the process of creating my v-bit tool precisely again I'm actually going to be using all the same tool geometry here I'm just going to modify a couple of settings so a handy way of doing that is to actually duplicate an X to the existing tool path it's slightly complicated by the fact that the existing tool path created to actual end tool path in our list one for the V bits and one for the end mil but as long as we use these and we're happier with the fact that when I click duplicate I get to toolpaths back there's no problem with that okay so it's duplicated both bits of that tool path that we created and now I can double click to go into the tool path and we can modify some of the settings so for starters this is going to be the in line okay and what we're going to do now the previous tool path took us down to a depth of 0.2 inches now what we're going to do for the male is split that point two to be a start depth of 0.1 and a flat depth 0.1 so effectively we're going to come down to make a little shoulder here and then machine our V bit depth down to the same total depth as the female pocket so the resulting maximum depth we're going to achieve will still be point two but we're going to machine away a little bit at the top here to allow the male in later fall to fit right inside the pocket that we've created so effective I've split the values there point one and point one but everything else stays the same we've got the same V bit tool the same end mil same other parameters I've changed the name here the final thing I need to do is select all of the vectors that we created so that's the flipped mirrored version of the original artwork plus the boundary vector so that we machine away the area between the two rather than it inside our artwork and click calculate and immediately it takes us to the preview tool paths block again and it's initially a little bit confusing because we've got the simulation of the previous pocket tool path still visible there but that's no K we can reset the preview and now we can see our tool path more clearly they're both visible by default here so we can just preview the visible tool paths to see the male part and as you can see what we've done is use that end mill to machine away the vast bulk of the material and we've now produced the V bit cut as well outside of all of our artwork so we've now a matching inlay that will fit inside the pocket that we'd created first and both bits of our both tool paths are now in the same file obviously we'd need to output these pairs path separately because we're going to cut different material with each but essentially that's the process and it can lead to some really really spectacular results so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial

Channel: Vectric Ltd

Views: 147,059

Keywords: vectric, cnc, aspire, aspire 4, vcarve pro, vcarve pro 7

Id: d4992bEoNYI

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2013