Fusion 360 Tutorial | CAM Order of Operations - DIY Mechanical Keyboard

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel thank you so much for joining me today i'm experimenting a little bit with a different format because my videos tend to be fairly long-winded as you've already seen and they're more of a conversation style rather than literal instruction and so i thought maybe it would be best to have my face present in the videos because that way i'm talking directly to you guys and you guys are interacting with me especially through the comments which i greatly appreciate and we can kind of go forward with that so leave me a comment down below if you'd like to see this kind of format going forward but otherwise let's get to the video so you kind of got a little snippet in the intro of what i'm working on today so this is episode 2 of cam infusion 360. and today we're going to be talking about the order of operations and what i mean by that again which i'll go into much more detail later is we need to pay attention to the progress of our part through the manufacturing process so that way what we're doing in one operation doesn't end up hindering something that we need in another operation and i thought that the best example that i have that i've worked with is mechanical keyboards now many of you may not be really that familiar with mechanical keyboards but essentially they're custom diy made from scratch keyboards that you can put your own keycaps on you solder your own circuit board you can buy or make your own case and it really allows you to fine-tune your comfort while you're working at your desk and i'll show you guys the finished product near the end of the video but let me show you why i think mechanical keyboards was my toughest project yet okay so jumping into fusion 360 let's take a look at what makes this model quite difficult to machine so at first glance this model seems fairly you know fairly normal right you've basically got a rectangle and you can do a 2d pocket from this surface down to that surface just kind of avoiding some pillars so that way my circuit board has something to mount to not terribly too difficult or dissimilar to the gift box that we just modeled or that we just did in the last episode the challenge with this is that this kit this keyboard sits at an angle so if i look at it from the side you can kind of see what i'm talking about so we've got this surface which has two parallel surfaces that are at about a two and a half degree angle and these two surfaces are perpendicular to those as well so that means that when we machine this pocket we need to be able to hold it see if i can get this oriented correctly we need to be able to hold it rough like roughly like this so our z-axis can cut straight down and so that means that we actually cannot machine this back side first unless we're able to hold that back side at a very specific angle now i am not a particularly competent manual machinist and so i wouldn't be able to set up the parallels or a sign bar or anything like that to get that angle dead on and machine it that way so constraint number one that we're running into is we've got tapered and non-parallel surfaces which means we're going to have to find a way to machine this side first and then constraint number two is we need to be able to flip the part over and then machine this side after the first side is done so constraint number two is two-sided machining and also with two-sided machining as if anybody is trying to do it is you run into alignment problems so you need to actually make sure that when you flip that part over it's still perfectly centered on that um on your machine so that way everything lines up and you don't end up off like cutting skewed and ruining your part so that's constraint number two and we'll go into detail about how i tackle these in the minute constraint number three is once we flipped over the parts we need to actually be able to hold on to those parts in both orientations right so if i go back to the first side i need to be able to hold on to this part and still machine the entire inside here so i know that i'm going to have to cut this from a larger stock and that's not terribly big deal right obviously we as c we tend to cut from larger stock but we need to not only cut from a larger stock but we need to provide a way like i said in constraint two we need to provide a way to hold the alignment and then constraint number four is that we need to be able to maintain our work offsets in both orientations so what can happen let me see if i can show this so if if i'm cutting in this orientation first and i zero my work offsets to the x and y and then to z and then i cut down to this pocket right and then i flip the part over so let me look at it from this angle and then i flip the part over well this is the edge that i had just zeroed off of right let me flip it back and see if i can show you so that was the edge that was over here before then we flip it over and now all of a sudden my work offset is thinking it's on well it's still thinking it's in this corner but that corner is now over here so if i don't have my stock set up very accurately in my machine well then as soon as i flip it over this corner might be a sixteenth of an inch too far this way or too far this way and now i'm going to end up cutting into the boundary of my stock so or not stock of my model and ruin my part so i need a way to flip this part and keep it symmetrical and hold on to the part and keep my work offsets in all orientations so those are three pretty big constraints um another constraint is that we're gonna have to do some tool changes right because we can do a flat end mill cutting into the top here but on the back side we can do part of it with a flat end mill but eventually we're going to have to come in with a bowl nose or a round end mill of some sort or like a radiused flat end mill and smooth all these out with some 3d contours so we know that we're going to have to at least have two tool changes or sorry at least one tool change so this hole here is an eighth of an inch and i could cut this entire pocket with an eighth of an inch bit but then it would take a significantly long time to mill all that out with an eighth of an inch bit so i know that i would like to cut this out with at least a quarter inch bit swap over cut these holes with an eighth inch bit flip the part over right then mill out most of my stock with that same quarter inch bit and then switch to a round over so i'm going to end up having at least three tools and i don't want to have once i put one tool in the machine i definitely don't want to ever have to take that out until i am done using that tool on all surfaces that i need to and so that way i never have to re-zero my work offsets when that tool is still installed so that's another constraint and then as a bonus i would like this is my own personal constraint but i would like to have this be a repeatable setup where i can come back in a week and make another one or in a month make another one and not have to worry about alignment or anything like that i can just set it up again run it and be done with it so those are some of the things we're going to need to keep in mind as we program the cam for this part now just as a heads up most of the programming in this model is actually very similar to what i showed you in the last video so i'm not going to be doing a ton of cam programming in this video but more so showing you kind of my thought process as i went down this so that way you can apply those to your models and how you imagine those constraints and how you order your tool paths in a way so that way you can be successful from start to finish so let's go ahead and switch over to the manufacturing workspace and we'll start showing you how i approach this so the first thing i did was actually create a little fixture and what this allowed me to do it actually helped me a lot because the hole here these four holes are for dowel pins and what that allowed me to do is basically have a fixture that i can drop down onto my cnc at any point i want to make this part and maintain my alignment in the same spot on my cnc i just install some dowel pins throw this fixture on and i'm basically set up and ready to start cutting so that's pretty that's a cool little feature the second feature is i gave myself a dowel pin here and here so that way i can then flip my part and i'll show you that in a second the third feature of this is that i have a little recess here now this recess serves two two major functions first one is it allows me to go below my stock with the end mill so i don't have to worry about if you know my z is just not quite perfect i can set my program to cut like a 30 second below and go all the way around and then the final one which is arguably the most important of all is on three of my corners i placed a fillet and the point of that was that one of my corners i did not and this corner basically by applying the fillet there it told me this is the corner i always zero all of my programs off of i never have to zero my program off of my stock or my model at any point i have the same fixed or known point on my cnc where all of my programs start no matter what orientation the part is in and so that's a really handy little trick that i did so let me see if i can show you the stock that i made so it looks like this so what this allows me to do is basically i can cut my stock on the table saw to five and a half inches wide by 15.75 long by let's see by one inch tall so i can cut my stock to that size and then i can just set it on my jig and i can use these edges right here as alignment and so that'll just get me roughly roughly in place so that i know as long as i center it between those or get as close to those edges as possible i know that my stock is going to have enough material both on the left and the right in order for me to have full access to my model or not full access but my model will sit inside that stock so long as i have that centered up and then what i can just do is clamp down from the from the outside down onto the part and hold the part down for its first operation so that's kind of how it's set up now these dowel pins i will show you these in a moment but essentially those are obviously so that i can flip the part but when the stock is sitting on the fixture in this at this point there's no dowel pins it's just a square chunk of a square chunk of wood or rectangle chunk of wood i get it roughly in alignment as close as i can get it and then just clamp it down and by modeling the stock this way rather than what i did in the previous episode where i had fusion create a stock for me is i was able to model in these dowel holes so that way i would be able to machine those and i didn't have to include those actually in my part so this is just for setting up for the flip but i didn't actually have to include that geometry in my part whatsoever i just built that right into the stock so in my first so my first setup was actually for my fixture so i can go and show you that real quick let me hide the stock real quick okay so the first one is just a open that up so i have a stock that's exactly the size in fact i believe i just used nope i did fix size box and i told it the size that i wanted it to be and then i came in and i did a boring operation to mill out these holes for the dowel pins and i kept the taller i saw using the negative stock to leave from my previous episode i fine-tuned that hole so i set the hole relatively small and then i fine-tuned that hole until i got the fit that i wanted on the dowel pins so that way there was no slop in them side to side but it wasn't so tight that i couldn't take the fixture off later i didn't have to hammer the fixture on so i had it so i could actually just take it straight off but there was enough there was just enough slop in there was easy to take off but i could still maintain nice alignment and then i came in and bored these holes but these ones i wanted to be tight right so i i did again i did the same thing where i left some stock to leave and then i milled those down until i had a nice kind of press fit with the dowels because once those dowels are in there i don't want them coming out at any point so that's why i kept those two separate from or these four separate from these two because i wanted them to be slightly different sizes then i came in and just did a pocket operation to cut in the recess and then i just cut my contour and i didn't need any tabs in this particular or i didn't even want any tabs in this particular case so i ended up basically as as its final pass was going around i just put my hand on it and held it down so that way i could um actually no i didn't do that i once the dowels were milled and they went fur far enough down into my wasteboard i just put the dowels in there which kept it in place and then i just put a little pressure with my hand on top to hold it in place so that's how i cut the fixture so let's go and hide that and let's start working through this so the next operation let's show our model actually here we go so here's our stock and the next operation is i just only had one thing that i needed to do with the eighth inch bit so i just took that care of that right away and you can see that my zero point for this operation even though i'm cutting into my material here is on my fixture so that's really important because all of my programs have to start from that corner and so i just took my eighth inch bit and i milled out the holes so if i go back to the design space i milled out all of these holes go back to manufacturer and then then i did a tool change so i just did a tool change right away because most of the milling on this part is going to be done with a quarter inch flat end mill so i went to a 2d adaptive so right now there's no dowel holes even though it shows in the because it's modeled off my stock the dowel holes haven't been cut yet that's the last operation in here so i did a 2d adaptive pocket and i did a pretty deep pocket i did i think about a quarter of an inch but i left a pretty light let me see i actually did a 0.1 optimal load at a depth i want to say of about 0.25 that looks about right and then so that took me down to the surface of my pegs or my standoffs and then i needed a separate operation to come down to the final depth but avoiding my pegs now you'll notice when i modeled it i actually came back after trying to do the cam and made some changes so that there's actually distance between the pa there's enough distance between the pegs near the wall here that my quarter inch bit can actually get in between there without running because originally i ran into a lot of cam errors because my my bit couldn't actually get in between there and so it was telling me no you need to do that do this with an eight inch bit so that's actually what all these recesses are for then i came in with a 2d contour and i'll simulate this in a second so you can see it all at once i came in with a 2d contour to kind of chip off this little edge up here and then i did basically a finishing pass to come in and cut to make sure all these surfaces were at final size and then i did a preliminary contouring operation and i'll explain why i did that when we get down to the later steps and then i milled in my dowel pins now i actually didn't go all the way down i don't think i can select it let me see if i can make this transparent let me simulate that operation so if i go to simulate and i make the stock transparent no i actually did mill it down okay i did mail it down all the way i think let's see no i did not come back yeah so i milled it most of the way through that was enough for of a height for my dowel pins to stick in all the way without bottoming out um but i did that for a good reason because when i got to the other side i milled i milled the other half and that way um i was able to actually run a bolt through and hold it down so let's see let's close that and let's simulate this whole setup and see what it looks like so let's go simulate let's turn off transparency here there we go sorry okay so first order business this is with a quarter inch flat end mill is the 2d or the 2d adaptive pocket and then it's doing another clear to get to the bottom where the pegs are so i did that all in two passes oh we kind of skipped through that really fast slow this down okay then i did the trim on the outside then i came in with another operation to do a finishing pass right here on this outer wall to clean up any steps from my quarter inch end mill and then it's also doing a finishing pass on the outside of all of the standoffs and then once it's done with that it's going to do the rough the rough contour on the front side so that's just going to go all the way around i want to say about a quarter of an inch deep now the reason why i left it left it there is because remember i have a tapered bottom so if i cut all the way down then i would end up by the time i mill my the back side of my part i would have nothing left to hold on to so i'd have no opportunity for tabs so that's why i left it there and i'll show you it might be able to be more visible when i get to the other operations so let's move on to the next step now this is still with a quarter inch flat end mill and let's simulate this and this is still on the same side oh i need to slow that down okay it might be kind of hard to tell but it's basically another finishing pass actually let's simulate both of these together so you can see it okay let's go to right here okay so that's where we left off sorry and then once it was done done with that it bores the holes and then i did a another finishing pass here because at this point i took my metal plate and i needed to make sure that it fit in there so i left myself an extra finishing pass that i could adjust just in case the fit wasn't quite right and in this case it wasn't so i took a little extra amount off and that's what this finishing pass is for and then this is actually really interesting so now what i did was i gave myself the taper on these now the proper way to do this would be with like a chamfer bit or a round end mill but i chose to do it with a flat end mill because these features are so small that you're never going to be able to see these ridges so i ended up spiraling down cutting a small chamfer on the end of each one of those and the reason that chamfer was important is because the part of my circuit board where it was touching was only as round as this green surface right here i couldn't have the full diameter go up otherwise it would hit some of the circuitry so that that was cool about that is that allowed me to not have a tool change so i could do all of that without a tool change so we're still working with the same bit and i haven't re-zeroed the part yet and then it's going to come through do that to each hole and then lastly i did one more finishing pass because this wasn't measuring correctly so then i came in and did that as well i had one more finishing pass just to tidy that up so that's what that operation looked like now that's the entire front done at that point let me pull this back up real quick we'll go straight to the end i did i didn't simulate both there we go simulate go all the way to the end and this is essentially what let's call it operation one is we did almost all of it with one end mill and one zero of our work offset um we only did the very very beginning with an eighth inch we swapped out and we did the rest of it with a quarter of an inch end mill even though we could have done a tool change but now we're set up to go ahead and flip the part over so let's go to the next setup and let's show this okay so i'm going to simulate this one first so you can see what it's doing so we've got the same thing where our actually i changed my work offset to the middle for a reason later on i will tell you about but it actually should be right here in this corner but i will explain why i did it in the center later so what it's going to do is it's going to clear out most of the material we need off of that back side so that way our round over or not our round over but our round end mill or bull nose end mill has very little work to do so let's get through that okay still clearing that out so it's doing it in steps and right now it's pre-contouring the back side so that way the round end mill has a has space to come down and travel up and down the part so i needed to clear out this material now that's why i said on the back side or on the the front side that we just finished i only went partially down with the contour because with this contouring the back side i had to think about how am i still going to hold on to that part and so i have like you know maybe a quarter of an inch of material here still holding on to that part even though this is now contoured down okay and now it's going to go to its 3d tool path so now i did my second tool change to my round over bit not round over i keep calling it that my round end mill and i did a scallop tool path so it's going around the perimeter each time stepping up a little bit z and in and offsetting both an x and y so that it's going to clear out that material and i can show you a video while this is going on the screen here and then that's my operation so this is what i was left with with the back so essentially i've got one big tab right here and the backside's done so now all i have to do is take the part off cut off the tab take it over to my router table and flush trim that off now at this point i was pretty confident that everything was machined correctly and so i went ahead and took off my part cut it flush trimmed it like i just said and then it dawned on me that what had happened is my cnc had lost some steps in the stepper motors and so i actually had let me pull up the design here so i had originally a i think it's a quarter of an inch yeah a quarter of an inch wall right here but on one side i had like 3 16 and then the other side i had like 3 8 and i didn't notice it when it was cutting because it was a long operation and i had stepped out for a minute and when i took it off i was like oh no and i had just cut off my dowel pins and was like how in the world am i going to get this back on my cnc and trim this back up or do i have to start all the way over because this is a nice piece of wood and i just spent all this time machining it and i was like oh my god so this is when i kind of learned my lesson about making sure i'm diligent in my setups making sure that i'm not being too aggressive with my cuts and i'm not losing steps or anything like that and so what i ended up doing was adjusting my model so this i found this was going to be the easiest way to do it let me see if i can find that other model it's slightly narrower so if i hide this one you can see that i made the exact same model but i made it about a sixteenth of an inch offset inside so that way i didn't end up with a quarter inch but i ended up with three sixteenths on all sides so that presented a big problem because now i didn't have the correct alignment right my dowel pins were cut off so if i would have caught that ahead of time i could have kept it on the cnc kept my alignment and gotten a perfect result but what i ended up having to do which really was infuriating is the only way i could machine that is from this orientation right so i had to machine it from this side with no tabs or anything and i had to hold on to the part somehow but i can't exactly clamp down onto the back of the part because it's pretty thin between these two sections i want to say it's like an eighth of an inch and so i don't want to put a lot of pressure on there and then i can't squeeze it from the sides because it's now hollow right and i also needed to cut the full perimeter so i needed access to all sides of this model so what i ended up doing was the old super glue and blue tape trick so what i did was i applied some blue tape to this rim right here and then i taped down onto my waste board applied some super glue like spray ca glue and then stuck it down as close to perfect alignment as possible now thankfully i had my um my jig so let me pull that up so i used these corners actually not these ones um because now it's smaller i used these inside corners right here where my model was and i tried to line that up perfectly and with that i was able to i was able to basically run a new operation and trim the outside and i narrowed that in and i was able to get a decent result i almost lost the entire project because i wasn't paying attention and so both in my a little bit in my cam and in my um in my setup on my cnc so that's why i ended up setting my zero point because i came back in here and the only thing i could really zero off of at this point right because i didn't have that perfect alignment anymore is i needed to measure off of the model itself to hopefully guarantee that i was in center because this reference point is only good if i'm lined up with these dowel holes but since i'm no longer lined up with the dowel holes i had to measure off the part itself so that's why i went ahead and made a zero point tried to line it up with my fixture as close as humanly possible and then i zeroed from the outside of my part to the other side in the middle went in y and back into the middle and that's how i got my zero point all right so before we call this video a wrap let's go ahead and head over to my toolbox and i will show you guys what the fixture looked like and what the finished keyboard looked like and we'll talk about any last takeaways i'll see you over there alright welcome back to my toolbox so here's the actual fixture that i used for this project i kept it around in case i ever wanted to make another one of these or make some modifications to my existing one and here is the dowel pins so i use 3 8 precision ground dowel pins they're accurate within about a thousandths of an inch and they're more than strong enough to hold up to everything and they're basically infinitely reusable i've got them in a bunch of different sizes laying around the shop but essentially these are the long ones that go in into the fixture that hold the part and they require a little bit of force but with a little bit of effort or muscle i can pull these out there we go so i can pull those out in case i need to run a new set of stock on top so they're not permanent but they do require some force to get in and out and then i've got these smaller ones which on my toolbox sit proud of the surface but when they're in my cnc they sit flush with the top so that way they stay out of the way of my cutter just in case anything bad happens and so these ones take much less force to install but they still have basically no slop in them but i can pull them out with ease and that was kind of the ideal scenario for me so that way i could actually take the fixture off quite easily and here is the finished keyboard so it's kind of a non-state non-standard layout it doesn't have a numpad which is kind of an oversight on my part because being uh someone who cad models a lot not having a numpad is kind of infuriating so that is actually one of my future projects is to make a matching numpad to go with this keyboard it might be kind of hard to see from this angle but you can see the little offset that i had where originally the keyboard would have been flush with this outer edge of the fixture but because i ran into that little problem or big problem it is it is a little bit smaller on the walls than i wanted but actually turned out really nice and i'm quite happy with it now the reason why i made this video is because it's really important to think about how you're going to model your part but it's also more almost more important if you're going to be making it to think about how you're going to manufacture the part and what do the steps in that manufacturing process look like and how does that impact your progress through the model and so you have to think about how you're going to hold on to the part how you're going to zero your work offsets how if you're going to flip it how you're going to keep it in alignment how if you do take it off and you cut something off is that going to cause unrepairable damage that you're not gonna be able to finish the project so you have to think through the process start to finish and structure your order of operations in a way so that way what you do in step one doesn't mess you up in step two or step 26 so an engineer i work with once told me that his goal as an engineer is not to never fail but rather to fail as fast as possible because the faster we can learn from our mistakes the faster we can get on to making cooler i hope you guys enjoyed this video and i'll see you in the next project

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 1,280

Keywords: #inventables, Autodesk Fusion 360, CAD, CAD Modeling, CAM, CAM Basics, CNC, CNC Router, DIY, Fusion 360, Fusion 360 Beginner, Fusion 360 CAM, Fusion 360 CAM Guitars, Fusion 360 CAM Tutorial, Fusion 360 Tutorials, Fusion 360 keyboard, Guitars in Fusion 360, KBD75, Tutorials, Xcarve, autodesk cad, fusion 360 keyboard cam, fusion 360 mechanical keyboard, fusion 360 tutorial, mechanical keyboard, mkb

Id: APK0zo1nIeU

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021