How To Flatten A Wood Surface on The CNC

hi my name is LIN and this is the darb and orbit Channel and in this video I'm going to share the method we use to surface a large countertop on the CNC so this is my Avid CNC machine it is a 5 by 10 foot unit and the surface we're working on today is a cherry countertop this is a side grain glue up and the final Dimensions will measure two by four feet so it's a little oversized at this point now I think this project here is an ideal candidate to surface on this fancy since it wouldn't fit through a thickness planer and it is just big and heavy and annoying to move around plus it's just a lot of work to get this nice and smooth so CNC to the rescue so go to start doing the bottom side first step number one securing the piece we're using cam clamps here just holding it in place from the sides since we need access to the entire top to cut on like if you didn't need that you can always clamp from from the top but that's not an option here creating your file I'm using that trick by Aspire the details may be a little different in another program but the principles remain the same and of course whatever settings you have will vary depending on what Machinery you have what equipment so just take whatever I'm using with a with a grain of salt and apply it to your specific situation now since we're surfacing the whole board it's easier to just over cut it a touch I'm starting my Anchor Point at negative 0.5 for both the X and the Y now the size of this board will eventually be 48 by 24 inches so let's increase that just a touch to 49 by 25 inches let's set up our tool path we're doing a pocket cut starting at zero and we'll go down 0.05 inches for this cut here so five thousand let's select our bit we're going to use a 2 inch End Mill this bit will create a lot of dust but it's pretty effective sometimes I like to use a three quarter inch up cut bit when surfacing which create more chips but it's a little rougher and not quite as fast so I like to calculate how long it's going to take okay 1 hour 48 minutes that's too long so let's go back and adjust the step over rate from 10 to 40 this means it will create a rougher cut but that's okay it's also a lot faster and we're doing 250 inches per minute okay this is much better now it's going to take nine minutes about so let's start running the first cut so as you can see the spindle starts on the inside and works its way out this is sped up by two thousand percent I have dust collection attached here and it's doing a pretty good job of capturing the sawdust I have a dust shoe on here and yeah I really need to make a video about this project here because this has been really great it works well so it looks really good um since this is the bottom side I'm not going to do another pass I mean there's a little bit of a dip right there but it doesn't matter for the bottom so but before actually turning it over like there's some longer pieces coming out here and these are higher now so before uh we're able to turn it over we need to actually trim these off this is a big heavy piece though so kind of difficult to maneuver around but having the sliding table on the saw staff is really nice for situations like this because it really learns a lot of support okay so now we're going to um trim the uh the board here and we have a flat side to put it down on the saw now if we didn't have that sliding table on a table saw I think a circular saw and a straight edge would have been a better choice obviously you could also cut it to size on the sensor but if you have other tools use those because it's more efficient I mean some things the CNC is great for others you're really better off um using like a saw for certain things for cuts like that but of course if your CNC is your main tool you could you know cut on it as well it's just going to take a while and create some dust so got the uh the top section up here now and it's actually risen up a little bit because I'm going to use um a suction unit this is the vacuum hold down system so uh this is the the pump right here got it connected to a tube and the pads are underneath the unit so we're going to turn this on we're gonna out so this is going to run the whole time it doesn't use that much power and it's not that loud so we're gonna have three things running the whole time now the dust collection the the CNC and uh that's okay so now we're basically going to repeat the step that we did on the bottom side for the top side securing your work piece to the CNC I think is one of the the biggest things to get right and obviously there are multiple ways to achieve the same goal side clamps like Camp clamps or in the situation vacuum they both work really well so let's do one pass first okay so now we have done one pass let's go back to the program so for our first cut we started at zero now let's start at 0.05 which is how deep we cut previously um and so this is our new starting point and we'll do another five thou cut foreign this way for the next cut we'll start at point one and then point 15 inches since each time we're taking five thou off when you are surfacing it's always an equation about how rough a cut you're comfortable with how fast you want the process to take but for our final cut here we want a smoother surface so we are adjusting the step over rate so it's not quite as aggressive and the time estimate for this cut is almost 44 minutes you know which is okay because we're only doing it once so at this point we have a nice smooth counter that is ready to be trimmed to the exact dimensions and ready to be sanded finished all of that I hope this was a helpful video if you are in the same situation please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon bye [Music] foreign

Channel: Darbin Orvar

Views: 17,626

Keywords: cnc, machining, surfacing, cnc machine, flattening, tips, tricks, techniques, feed rate, step over rate, milling bit, end mill, cnc work, diy, woodworking, countertop, roughsawn, glueup, board

Id: qKJXz0vXOCY

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022