How To Make Amazing Inlays on CNC Router, Easy CNC Router Projects - Garrett Fromme

have you been wanting to learn how to create inlays with your cnc router then you've come to the right video because i am going to teach you exactly how to do inlays from the beginning to the very end and i am going to take you step by step through the entire process and by the time you're done you will watch your own amazing in-lay cnc router project come to life just like you're watching here you're going to learn actually how easy it is to create an inlay and how perfect you can get them so long as you follow a few simple specific steps which you are going to get in this video what i'm going to do with you is we are going to find the design in this case the feather and then we're going to actually design up the inlay for the insert and for the base piece and then we're going to run out tool paths and then you and i are going to run it out on our long mil cnc router i'm going to teach you how to take two raw pieces of lumber a piece of oak and a piece of walnut and i'm going to show you how to set them up on the router and then carve out the female part and the base piece the male part and i'm going to show you how to get these guys together if i can just get them to match up properly there we go just like that and then we're gonna finish it up into a perfect perfect inlay i want you to take a look at how perfect this inlay really is it almost looks like the same piece of wood just stained but i can prove to you that it's not because i've got more of them and another one there you go look at that and look how perfect all these inlays are and you are about to know exactly how to do this in fact i'm going to give you this inlay file i'll give you the design file the picture of the feather and i'm gonna give you the g-code so if you follow the setup instructions all you have to do is just create the project the link is down below if you want to follow along with me so what we're going to do is get on the computer now we're going to run through the whole design concept and then we're going to get onto our long mill and we're going to create this amazing project let's get going okay we are in the vectric software now i just want to let you know that the majority of software's out there you can do this with even the freebies if you finesse them the right way just follow what i do here to the t and you will have an amazing inlay project in a very short period of time and i want to tell you this there are easy to do once you get it down so the first thing we want to do is determine the project that we want to do so this will be the first step we're going to get the bitmap that we want to create and turn into an inlay and then we're going to design it up and we're going to do the male and the female designs first then we're going to worry about tool paths so the first thing is the design the bitmap when we go to google images as you know you can get all kinds of images and one of the things i don't like to see people do is let's just say you want to do the feather and you want to start from scratch and so you come to google images and and let's just say you like this one right here and so you take a screenshot of it and then use it as a as your bitmap template when you look down here there's a price of 1.99 somebody did some work to create this do them the favor and the honor and pay for it if you don't then basically you're taking from somebody and we don't like to have things taken from us and it's 1.99 please be respectful that way let's take it from a different perspective if you are wanting to earn an income with your cnc machine and you're taking from people who are trying to earn an income with their cnc machine or their cnc related skills that's not a good habit to be in somebody did work and they're trying to earn an income off of it and eventually you'd want to be doing the same thing so honor that person and make sure that if you use a vector that someone's trying to sell that you pay for instead of just doing a clip off the screen let's get back to this now what you can do is do what i do and i will do a search in google for free feather dxf png image whatever you want to do and so i just did free feather png i go to images and i'll select the feather that i want to do so you can do this in the same way you can even do one as challenging as that i might try that one next that's kind of fun once you do this and not challenging at all so we'll just grab this one here we'll click that and i just want to make sure that this is free so it says png free so i am happy with that so what we're going to do is basically use our snipping tool now if you don't know what a snipping tool is you come down to the little white box here and the pc and start typing snip snip and your snipping tool should come up oh it didn't take any s so s and ip there we go and there it is you select that and the snipping tool will launch there it is right here and all you do is select new click that and everything behind you will gray out behind this box here but you look at my cursor it's now a plus what you can do is simply start a window and grab a window around that project and now it has saved it and now we're there we're going to select this here it says copy so you're copying it to the clip board you can also save it as a file and then import it so now we're going to go over to vectric and we'll create a new job and i know the job size i'm working with is 10 inches by five and a half inches by an inch and a quarter thick and the material surface is where we're going to be working off of and we want to be on center of the project and use your standard resolution and click ok now we have our project now all you have to do is hit control v and there's your image and you can create the bitmap out of that now since i am going to make this feather available to you that i did we're not going to use that so now you know how to import one we're going to delete that just by hitting the delete button while it was selected and now we're going to go to import bitmap up in file operations it's this little folder with a little arrow coming out of it select that and you'll come into whatever directory and you come into the directory that you want that has the image in it so i selected that feather that i did and now we want to trace vectors around it so when you trace vectors around it the image has to be selected so if you see if i snap click off to the side this is grayed out a little bit that means it's not selected so when i just click over it it's now selected you see now it's kind of bold and if you look carefully you'll see a purple dotted line going around the image that means the image is now ready to be traced so we come over to create vectors and down at the bottom there's a little folded airplane type of looking thing it says trace bit map select that now one of the things i just want to point out it's easiest to use images that have stark contrast and what i mean by that is i'm going to come back over here you see it's black black black here and white white white here so this would create a good outline image however right down here it gets a little white it'll still work but you just have to make a few adjustments so i just like to work with images that have nice stark contrast if i close that out and i just look at some of these other ones let's see something that does not have a stark contrast also all these have a nice back uh plain background to them like here you might have some difficulty with this yellow one because of the checkered background okay so we are going to come back here and we're simply going to make sure that we are selected on black and white and we are going to go with the defaults that vectric selects so you see this slide bar here and here at the bottom vectric has defaulted to those we can adjust those if we want but because it's a very stark contrasting image it'll come out quite nicely simply go down to the bottom and select preview and now you can see we have vectors around our image here and we're going to click apply and close so now we come up to the layers area right here and when it turns blue you click it with your mouse button and this box will open up and you see there are two layers there's a bitmap layer and a layer one when you imported the picture it created a new layer called bitmap layer and that's where the image is at well we don't need the image anymore so we are simply going to turn that off by clicking a little light bulb and we want to make sure up here it says layer one and we are simply going to click off and there is our feather but we have to do a little bit of work to it so we are going to doctor that up and this is why we have to do work to it you see the border here is part of the feather so if i clicked anywhere on the border right here the feather is going to highlight as well i don't want that to happen i want to make the feather all one vector so what i'm going to do is come over and grab the curve or draw arc and i'm going to make sure my snaps are turned on both of these first two have to have boxes around them and that means our snaps are on and then i'm simply going to hover over that intersection point now you see there's a little black dot showing up that means that we are now referencing that and we're just simply going to hover over it and click once and now we have clicked right on that corner and we're going to come over to the other corner and click on that and then we're just going to make a little arc about like that and you can see it's not clean totally it's like doesn't flow smoothly but considering the size of it that this is a 10 inch piece you'll never see that minor deviation so we're not going to worry about that and then we're going to do the same thing to each one of these grab each corner and create the arc and up top same thing there and right here and there we go so now we close this and we're going to grab our scissors right here because we're going to snip out these things now the software is now giving us the ability to cut away these areas that we don't want so we're going to click in each one we've gotten rid of those and one more and then we're going to escape and then we're going to simply select that box and delete it and there is our image now i select the feather and just to make sure that everything is connected properly i am going to come over to edit objects and select join or close vectors with a smooth curve and i'm going to select it several times and we are done so now we want to get the leaf rotated appropriately so i'm going to click it twice and these buttons come up around the leaf and i'm going to grab this outer button right there you can grab any of the four corners and i'm going to rotate to about where i want it at which is about right there and then we want to center it on the project so now we come over and click align selected objects under transform objects and we're going to align it to the job center so we want to select this middle button that'll move the whole project to the center of the whole that'll move the whole drawing to the center of the project and now you can see the feathers in position now so we'll close that and we are done with our base drawing now we have to make a really quick distinction here just so you know the terms i'm using we have two components that we are going to be designing up we're going to design up the insert and the base piece where the insert gets inserted to so we're going to call this the male component and this is the female component so what we're going to do is save this by clicking save and i am going to create a new folder called we'll call this the feather teach for teaching you because you're going to create this awesome project so we have a male and a female that we have to create and we just simply need to decide which one we're going to create first it doesn't really matter but this one will be the female so we're going to call it feather female and we're going to say okay so now we just saved that vector file so now we have to create the mail file and so simply what we're going to do is come up to file and save as and we're going to call it mail feather and save that so we are at a critical point right now and that is because you can no longer change anything about these files other than what i show you here if you do like change the size of the projects then they aren't going to work together and you'll be wasting your time from here on out so the feather sizes have to remain the same let's keep going now we have to create the mirrored copy and what we're simply going to do is select the male feather and this is where things become very important in order for this thing to fit into the female feather we have to create the mirror and the way we do that is come over to transform objects and the fourth icon in will say mirror selected objects select that and we want to make sure that we are checked on flip about job center and we do not want create a mirrored copy checked if we do that then a second feather will show up as a mirrored copy and the original will stay in place and we are going to click flip horizontal and now we have the male feather as a mirror so we are good to go with that so we're going to close that we're just going to save this real quick and now our base male feather is created so what we need to do is create some clearance space so that this feather can slip down into the female one of the things that is commonly taught all the way across the board in all inlay videos i've seen they come in and they will draw a square that's the size of the project so they'll let's just pretend this is the size of a project there and they'll draw a square that big and the reason being is because you want to clear out all this material so you can overlay this part into the inlay and so you need to remove all the material around it now i happen to think that that is a bit of an overkill because you have to machine out all this material in order to make that happen whereas what i like to do is simply cut some of the material around the feather and then take a scroll saw or the my table saw and cut away all the material up into the clearance area so you'll see what i mean about the clearance area but just leave it to this that this is taking up a lot of extra machining time to accomplish what most people are teaching so i'm going to teach you a faster little trick so we're going to delete that rectangle we're going to select the feather and we're going to come down to offset and layout and select the first item which is offset selected vectors click that and make sure you are clicked on outwards or right and pick your offset to be between half a millimeter sorry half of an inch to point to three quarters of an inch and i am set at three quarters of an inch and we're gonna offset click the offset button and now you see there is a general shape of the feather so now all we have to do is clear out this space instead of all of this space here so this part is done we are ready to machine it so we're first going to save click that and then we're going to click this blue button right up here so click this blue button that will turn off the cad or the drawing area and it'll turn on the tool path area so now we are ready to do our tool paths for both our male and our female but there's something i want you to understand before we get started so we're going to switch over to another drawing and so this is effectively what our project would look like if we took a cross section from it somewhere this one here is the male component or what we're getting ready to do the tool path for now and this one here is the female component where the feather will inset into it so this is oak this is walnut now when we put a inlay into a project the one thing we don't want is for the bottom of the project to be flush with the inlay like that because there's no place for the glue to go there may be some slight deviation on the side walls of the project that may create some gaps so we're going to set up some tool paths so what we have is we are actually contacting the side wall here and over here before the bottom makes contact and before the top makes contact that way we will have a nice flush contact all the way around and we'll be able to clamp the top piece down to the bottom piece and there will be no gap in our inlay so in order to do that we have to use particular settings for this and so from here on out you should probably take some notes into how we're going to be doing these tool paths the tool path information i'm going to be giving you for the mail section and the female section are super important and they work i don't want you reinventing the wheel so write down the tool path information that i'm going to be giving you as we do this i will also have it written down in the description and i may even have a download link down below where you can just download a form that has that information for you let's keep going the numbers i'm going to give you i want you to always use don't try to reinvent the wheel they work they work for many people you've probably watched a lot of videos of inlays or at least a few and people use some random tool path numbers i want you to use these numbers and trust that they will work as we go along okay so the first thing to know is when we look at this because we are tapered we're going to use a v carving tool path to carve both of these projects out so we're going to switch over to the male the flower this is the feather this is going to insert into the project core piece which will be the piece of oak and this is going to be the walnut so really all is going to be left is the shape of the flower when everything is cut away however we have a piece of wood and we've already created this boundary and we have this boundary because we need to create a v carb and we're going to v carve between this boundary and this boundary so all this will be v-carved now if you've done any v-carve work before you know that the bit will go all the way down until it creates a v in the middle in this case with such a wide area which is something that we want that v-carve would be really deep so we are not going to go all the way down we're going to use a special feature in vectric called flat depth now you will find this in the majority of your paid softwares and i don't think you'll find them in the freebie softwares like carbide create or easel however you can manipulate those softwares to make this work also maybe i'll do a video on that sometime later anyway so we want to be carved right in here all the way around the feather so we're going to use the v carve tool path now again remember this is the male and we are going to use very specific numbers here our start depth needs to be 0.09 use that number as your start depth then you're going to check the flat depth box we don't want to get this v all the way down so we want to stop that at some point that's what flat depth does it stops the v carving at some depth and we're going to set that depth to 0.02 and what this will do is this will allow us to have a .02 gap right here and right here which means these two walls are going to make contact and that's exactly what we want we need a place for the glue to ooze out from these two contact points so this will leave a gap underneath for the glue to settle in here and it'll leave gaps over here and over here for the glue to ooze out so these numbers are very important please do not reinvent the wheel and try to use a different number these work they've worked across the board despite any other youtube videos you have seen where people use different numbers these numbers work very very well so please use them the next is the bit itself now for average size projects like this feather i like to use the 90 degree v bit so we are going to select that the bit i'm going to use is the 90 by a quarter with a bladed edge on it it's a actual cutting edge as opposed to a flat edge here's the difference between the two this is a flat edge v-bit you can see that this is the cutting blade right here and as it spins around it's literally scraping the wood away whereas the bladed v-bit actually has a forward cutting knife edge on it it's considered a knife v-bit and these leave a much cleaner cut so this is the one we will be using 90 degree by quarter inch diameter i use that because it leaves a much cleaner cut around the project so it's a 90 by a quarter inch and we're going to select that now because we have a flat depth here as we are set up right now the 90 degree v-bit is going to try to clear all that out with a point so that's a lot of space to clear out with a point we don't want to take that time it'll take a long long long long time so we're going to use the clearance tool feature so you want to check the clearance tool box right there and you notice that this box now has turned white which means now we can insert something the bit i'm going to use is a very aggressive bit which is an upcut bit it's a 1 8 end mill now i'm just going to select my end mill here as a 1 8 this is my general endmill 1 8 and we're going to change the settings in just a moment i'm going to hit select and now we have the 1 8 bit so we're not going to use a down cutting bit we don't need to we're going to be doing a v carve which means this side and this side or boundary this boundary and this boundary are going to be v carved the clearance tool is simply going to clear away the material around the v area just to make things a lot faster so an upcut bit there's two reasons why we're using this in an inlay number one is the edges don't matter if you know up cuts it will tear the upper edge of your project but in this case it's not going to matter because we're coming back across it with a v bit that's going to clear all that away the second is an up cut bit can be much more aggressive than the down cutting bit so i will show you the bit that i am using it's one that i sell in the idc woodcraft store it's also made for drilling so i've had it designed specifically for this type of work where you can get very aggressive now the thing with the 1 8 bit that's going to be different here is we don't care about the finish of this surface it's going to be cut away when all said and done we're simply going to have the feather left behind so that allows us to be a lot more aggressive with the bit and we can have a much larger step over so in order to get really aggressive with this if you want to do like production work do what i do and use the 1 8 up cutting bit or even bigger if you want to but use your high feed rates with an upcut so i'm going to change that i'm going to go to edit and right now that 1 8 bit is set for my typical 1 8 down cutter which is 60 inches per minute i'm going to change that to 80 inches per minute and i want to make sure i get my depth of cut right so i know for right now that i have a certain depth i need to go to and that is 0.11 i want it to exceed 0.11 and you'll understand why in just a little while so what we're doing is we're going to make that 1.125 which is what you can do with a upcutting bit anyway is you can bring that depth of cut up to the diameter of the bit or even 1.5 times the diameter so we got a very aggressive cut and we're going with a 60 percent step over because i don't care about the finish i'll even go to a 70 step over i don't want to exceed 70. and we're going to click ok and now that is set up and now we're all set up i'm going to refresh or rehash this when you're doing the mail insert you do this in a v-carve your start depth will be .09 you will have your flat depth checked and that will be set at point zero two we're going to use a 90 degree v bit use a 90 for your average size projects if you go to small inlays you'll want to use a 60 if you go to large inlays usual 120. all these bits are available on the idc woodcraft store and links for everything that i talk about is down below including getting this file i will give you the g-code file so we're using a 1 8 up cutting aggressive bit at a very high feed rate just to get material out of the way and we're going to go with the offset cutting method rather than the raster climb or conventional doesn't matter and we are simply going to give this a name we're going to call it feather mail and we're going to calculate and it didn't select the vector so we'll select the vectors and then we'll calculate and now there are our tool paths so the broad tool paths out here are the 1 8 bit and the path up in here all these dark areas are the 90 degree v-bit and the 90 degree v-bit will also come across this line this tool path and this probably this tool path as well and it'll do the outer tool path thus creating a v-carve type of effect or tapered feather that will insert into a tapered female feather all right so with that we'll just preview it so i'm going to preview all tool paths and there's our feather now you can see we have tapers all the way around the feather and we have a taper out here it doesn't matter out here it's just by the nature of the v carving tool path that it's going to look for an inner and outer boundary and it's going to cut them both so even though it's going to cut that it's irrelevant this is what's important now one of the things we're going to do is we're going to name our tool paths we used a clearance tool and a finishing v-bit so the first tool path here is our clearance tool and that's a 1 8 bit so what we're going to do is we're going to right click that first one we're going to rename it to let's see feather male 1 8 uc that stands for upcut and we're going to put a one after female a feather male we're going to put a 1 in there and the reason is is because that's telling us that's the first program to run you'll understand this in a second in the second one we're going to rename it feather male 2 90 v so now we've got that complete i'm going to close that and we're going to save the tool path using this button right here so we click that and we want to save all the visible tool paths and we are going to come down to the word tool paths the check box next to it and we're going to select that check box and now you can see these two check boxes are selected that's what this button does it does a global selection of all the tool paths down here with the visible tool path to multiple files you want to make sure your post processor is set up i am using the gerbil inch post processor for the long mil cnc router which works just fine and then we're going to save our tool paths and i'm going to create the the so i have the directory i've already created it we're calling it feather teach so you see down here it says feather mail 1 1 8 you see what i want to do is delete the feather mail one we'll leave the feather mail but delete everything else and then we're gonna click save and now when i open up that directory let's see if we can find it we're going to go to the feather there it is feather teach and we have two g codes written for the mail and it's titled feather mail one feather male and it says one again 1 8 you see the second one it says feather male 2 so what vectric has done was based on the order of tool paths over here it put a 1 or 2 in it so we know now that this is the first one to run and this is the second one to run and by the file name we know that's the 1 8 up cut end mill and this one is a 90 degree v-bit so we're going to stop with that one we're going to close this and we're going to save this file save we're done with the mail aspect of this as far as the design goes and generating a tool path now it's time to get on to the female just remember the settings that we are using are very specific so please keep note of that and they are listed down below with the female settings that you'll need let's go on to the female and now we're going to open up the female so i'm going to go back to that directory we want to open up female feather so i'm going to double click that and there it is so this is our project piece the entire piece of oak and all we're going to do is cut out the feather inside of here now just want to show you what we have i'm going to come over to the mail and i'm going to switch back over to the 2d view and i'm going to turn these lines off by the way these little lines that you see these are the tool paths the actual path and direction that the bit is going to go so in order to turn that off you come up to this area up in here where you have all these icons there's going to be one that's just going to be highlighted with a little blue line select that and that'll turn that off so this is the male feather if you remember i'm going to click that and i'm going to ctrl v or copy it i'm sorry ctrl c i'm going to control c and copy and then i'm going to go over to the female and i'm just going to go ctrl v and that pastes it over now you see it's a mirror image of that feather so this one is the female this one is the male we just created and i just want you to see that they are duplicated but they're reversed so i'm going to delete that one because we don't want it and now we're going to generate the tool path for the female feather so we're going to come up here and click this blue button bring in the tool path area we're going to select that so we're going to go into the vcarve tool path select that and we are going to have the numbers in there that we had when we entered into the mail we don't want those numbers our start depth for a female write this down female is a v-carve and the start depth is zero the flat depth will be a point one one for the female section of the v carve your start depth of zero have your flat depth checked and that flat depth is point one one we wanna make sure we're using the same bit which is the 90 and that's fine now i'm going to take a look at my feed rates let's see what we got i've got a 70 feed rate which is just fine so we're just going to cancel that and leave it at that we're going to use the same 1 8 end mill so we want to use our clearance tool so make sure it's checked and we have the end mill that's the up cutting end mill that's suitable for aggressive work and for drilling and again we don't care about the edges that it creates because the 90v bit is going to come back in behind it and clear up any chip up that it has and we want to check our feed rate so we're going to go to edit i want to make sure we are up there and our feed rate is in some reason i have 0.125 in there i want my feed rate to be 80. and i'm going to say okay and there we go so everything is set there now all the original settings there and we are simply going to change the name we're going to call it fee uh feather female and calculate and so there is our female we are going to preview all selected tool paths and now you see we have the female with the taper so the male is going to drop right into that so that's done with the exception of changing the name so we're going to simply change the name of the first one which is the roughing we're going to call it female feather female 1 8 you see and we're gonna go to the second one we're going to call it feather female and that's going to be 90 v and we'll just enter we're going to close that we're going to go to the save click that come down to our tool path check that white box next to it make sure we are set up on visible tool paths to multiple files your post processor is set to what you want for the long mail it's gerbil and we save selected tool paths and then we are going to simply take the bit out of the end of the name and we're going to save now when we go back into that directory we now have the female tool path and again it's named it one with the 1 8 up cutting bit and two with 90 degree v bit so now our tool paths are set now we have to set up the machine we are ready to take this to the next step well that's it we're done with the design now it's time to throw it onto our long mill we get to start making this i was actually really pleasantly surprised that the long mill did this i did not expect this to be as clean and sharp and crisp as it actually turned out so getting that machine pleasantly surprised me on this one i've had a lot of fun making these but before we throw this on a long mill to get these things made we have to deal with our raw material so we're going to do that and then i'm going to show you how to set up on the cnc router to get these things done easy way let's get going so now we have two pieces of lumber to work with we have our oak base piece which we need to measure out which is 10 inches long and we need to cut our walnuts so that's going to need to be 10 inches long as well so we'll throw it on the miter saw and make sure the saw is square i want to try to avoid a step in the middle of the material although it doesn't really matter if you have a little bit of a step in the material the walnut we're going to cut in half because when you do an inlay it does not to be need to be very thick you can do it with a quarter inch piece of material because we are only going to make this thing a point one one deep so you can do it with even thinner material point two thick i'm gonna adjust the saw blade so it doesn't cut all the way up and only need to cut to the existing cut i had to be really careful and aware where the saw blade was as i was moving that through so now we have our board cut you can see right here we've got a little bit of a step that's inconsequential because this is like the bottom of the insert it's going to be inside the base material this side is technically the top now what we're going to do is sand it down and get all the rough spots off of it because we need to do this for the best holding that we're going to be using which i'll show you in just a minute let's get the sawdust off of it we're going to be using the tape and ca glue method and so we have to get all the sawdust off to have as much stickiness as we can have with tape so what we need is our base piece and then we need a little scraper some painters tape some thin ca glue now this is made by starbond and i have a 10 discount code on this if you want and then we're going to need the accelerator that'll accelerate the setting of the super glue you'll understand this in just a moment now when you're using this method what you do is you'll apply painters tape to your project piece now i am putting three strips down in this case we really didn't need three step strips only needed to because there's not a lot of force being applied against the project itself by the router bit so after you get it on there make sure you take your scraper and just press it all down so you get as much contact area as possible you see i've got a couple gaps there no big deal now what we're going to do is take advantage of our spoil board grid line and we're going to put the mating tape on the router spoil board that'll keep everything in line with the board then when we're done with that we're going to take our scraper again and press the tape down all the way around so now we've got a very good contact and you see i even got a little bit of a gap here that's okay it kind of makes the gap on the board doesn't really matter but now we take our star bond ca glue and we're just going to run a bead down each piece of tape about the length of our board that we're going to be cutting you see there's the bead and then what we're going to do is get ready to set the board on because when we spray the accelerator on this is going to accelerate quite quickly in the curing of the glue i slipped a little bit when i was doing that once you get it in line just hold it for about five to ten seconds and you'll be set once it's set then we gotta bring the router over and start getting our bit in this is the platform we're going to be using to run our long mill this is called g sender and g sender is the one i prefer it's very nice layout easy to work with and it's always being worked on and it's free for anybody that has a cnc router it's not just for the long mil cnc router for any cnc router that has the adreno based platform don't worry your router has the adreno based platform i highly recommend the software you can download it from the longmill website that they are actively working on it all the time for the entire cnc community so there's a link down below to be able to get that and install it on your computer all right so the first thing that we're going to be doing is zeroing out our bit which we're going to use these buttons here x and y to zero things out once we get things in position and then we're going to use the touch probe here i will make another video about the touch probe features and how they're being used so i won't run through that in here however i will run through the program loading for this project so we're going to get our bits set up and then we're going to load the first program so we bring the router forward and we're going to remove what we have in there which is the surfacing bit we'll get back to the surfacing bit later because we're going to need it to wrap up this project on the cnc router so whenever you take your bit out take your nut your collet apart with cleaning out with a toothbrush get the sawdust out of there because that sawdust will create problems for you later on if you don't do that so once you get it loosened up just blow it out and the first bit we're going to be working with is the 1 8 up cut bit and this is it this is one i sell on the idc woodcraft store now you can see this spiral is very aggressive going upward it's meant to take out a lot of material very fast and it's designed to drill then we use the one quarter to 1 8 reducing collet and you're going to insert that bit all the way to the flutes into the collet we're looking for as much support from the router as possible and then you insert the collet up until it's flush with the nut and give it a little extra tightening because we're using a collet and a collet now you see i've only got about a quarter of an inch sticking out so we're going to put a little cross mark on our board we don't need to find a critical xy zero point on this because we actually have quite a bit of extra material then we're going to bring the bit over and just eyeball it over that crosshair that we just created and we'll zero our x and y once we get in position now we're going to use the touch plate now long mill comes with this touch plate you have to order it as an add-on but this is very rapid in getting your router bit set up much better than the paper method so you bring the bit relatively close maybe within a quarter inch of the touch plate make sure your magnet is attached because that's needed to be there then start the zeroing cycle and the bit will come down it'll touch the plate to get its first reference and then it'll come down a second time to get a final reference and we are good to go all right now we are ready to go we have our bits zeroed out and we are now going to load our first program which is the male number one with the 1 8 up cutting bit so we're going to come down here to the load file select that and we're going to go to the directory feather teach and we're looking for the feather male 1 with the 1 8 up cut and that's it right there so we're going to select that and it's going to load up into the software and there it is there's our run around so with that we are simply going to turn the router on and we are going to hit the start job button and we are off so the first thing this thing is doing is cutting out the outer outline of the feather now look how fast this 1 8 bit is traveling this is why i use an up cut on this i'll just speed things up this gets interesting this is where the real fun begins and you are going to so much love doing this when you finally get to this point because what's really interesting is how fast every cycle runs this is at 80 inches per minute and we're cutting a 0.11 deep so now it's cutting in some of the detail of the feather and now it's going back and forth and touching a few points it's kind of interesting that the software will do this and it's not always very efficient when it comes around and cleans up these points like that but we don't care about the surface finish here so we're done and you see i got a lot of burr on there we got the core shape of our feather going on and now we're going to switch over to the bladed 90 degree v-bit now remember all these bits i have available on my store this one has that blade on it it's gonna cut things quite better than a flat blade will so we're going to insert it about halfway in we want most that bit up in there get as much rigidity out out of it as we can so i'm just going to sand off the burrs off the top briefly so i can use the touch plate again because they'll get in the way our x y is already set so all we have to do is just set our z with the bit change then if you're wondering about pit changes this is exactly how you do it your x and y is already set now you just have to set your z it's going to come down and touch and then we're going to get back into g center now that we're done with the first part of that program this is where the real fun begins when this feather completely takes shape and it's so much fun watching these when they're running so what we're going to do is come back to load file select it and we're going to find the feather male number 2 which is right here and it has the 90 degree v bit that's the bladed v bit which i absolutely recommend that you use over the flat the flat bits all right so when that imports you can see there's a dark line around that outside perimeter that we had that bit is going to follow along that perimeter on the outside it's going to v-carve the outside an area we don't need but that's okay it doesn't take that long and then it's going to go around inside the feather it's going to follow the perimeter of the feather and that's going to do a lot of clear cut where the eighth inch bit couldn't get to so when all is said and done this will drop right in after we do some cleanup so now all we have to do is hit the start button and run the job again and here we go and now we're running around and you see it's cutting the profile on the outside now you start to understand why that burr doesn't matter and why you want an aggressive bit especially if you just make multiples of these things like i did i mean once you make one it's kind of an addiction to do these inlays so i hope you've downloaded this feather inlay program i've given you remember i'm giving you the g code i'm giving you the the instructions and i'll give you the file now you can see that the 90 is coming back in it's cleaning up a bunch of messy little spots that the eighth inch end mill couldn't get to so it's going to do a lot of bouncing around here and not very efficiently this is probably the longest running program of the bunch and i'm going to say it ran for about five minutes but look at the feather coming to life already this is the male insert now it's done literally we take it off and you'll find in just a minute that all we have to do is get the burrs off of it and insert it into the female part and of course now we have to separate it from the table so i have to use a little stronger scraper but now you see how strong the ca glue is and what's so nice about it is it you know if you use clamps look at that feather if you're not impressed by now you should be give me a thumbs up if you're liking what you're seeing so there it is so now we're going to take it over to the scroll saw now you can do this a number of ways i just happen to have a scroll saw you can take it onto your table saw and cut it out you can cut it out with a jigsaw it's all torch it out whatever you want to do there's many ways you can do it but you see we didn't waste a lot of time taking out all that other material that we really didn't need to bother our time with we just cut what we needed to to get the profile out so that's why i recommend you doing that offset function that we used to design the mail and our mail feather is almost complete now we're just going to clean it up now i use these little dremel burs these things are great they're little sanding burrs they're not durable but they're not expensive either this whole batch costs like 10 bucks but these are little sandy discs and they each come in different grit so the black one is the lightest grit and the brown one is the toughest grit and you can just tell when you squeeze them what the grit is oh they have declaration but i never worry about it and we're just going to throw it into the dremel and i stopped using a little wrench on the dremel pliers work just fine and then what we do is we run around all the areas of the feather and start cleaning up all the little burrs that are hanging on it and this will take you about five minutes to do i do pay attention to making sure everything's out along the leaf profile where it's going to insert so it does drop in nicely of course we're going to fit it before we actually glue it in place but you see this this little sanding disc goes everywhere there will be a link down below in the description i got it off of amazon i highly recommend you get that if you're going to be doing these inlays then you'll want to get these little sanding brushes whatever they call them these things are great they're disposable like i said they don't last that long it's already starting to wear out i don't care it's about 10 cents a piece but this one's still good so we don't need to change it yet so now it's time to get onto the female component or the base piece so we again we need to vacuum everything up sand the bottom of your block and we need our our ca glue set up again tape thin ca glue this scraper and the accelerator and we're going to tape the same way again everything's pressed down we put our bead on we did a quick spray with the accelerator and we set it down we held it for about 10 seconds we're creating our little crosshair it's going to be right on the feather right there and it is solidly in place it is important to make sure you push it down now and now we have to go back to our 1 8 bit again again i remind you these are down in the description i s i'll give you two of them in that column our x and y has to be reset because we changed our project piece so we're just eyeballing it again and then we're going to set our z 0 using the touch plate which i totally recommend and then we're going to start the project off we have loaded up the female part of the roughing out program so i was having a little difficulty with my camera here so there were some issues going on that a little frustrating but i tried to chop out the difficulties what it would do it would just freeze on me so now what we're doing is we're doing the 90 degree v-bit i didn't show you the tool change you've seen enough of that but you see the first pass is simply outlining feather and it's going nice and quick this is why i use a bladed v bit as opposed to a flat v bit and i wanted you to see the whole run just so you understand how fast this is and it's just kind of cool to watch i'm just going to come back in and start cleaning out all of its stuff you see it's doing a lot of fine tune cutting now and it's knocking out most of the burrs as well of course we'll still have some cleanup to do in this thing but that's okay that's why we have the dremel again everything i'm talking about there are links down below for this and for the file to do this the g-code file so basically all you have to do is follow the instructions load and go so again the 90's coming in just cleaning some stuff up so you are gotten to the point now where you see this really literally coming together and how cool that feather is looking so imagine what project you can make and the idea that you're going to have a free file to start with that's pretty cool i was definitely surprised that the law mill was able to hold the detail where i could get a perfect inlay so now you see this feather is awesome so we're gonna get our dremel and we're gonna clean it up some more and the brush is starting to wear out so we are going to replace it so you see how long it lasted maybe five minutes still worth the purchase especially when you're doing endless so now we're just going to fit the mail into it for the very first time just slide it around this is where it gets scary will it go in will it go in yes and it fit like a glove you can feel it when you drop it down look at the gap it's so so close we have got it the reason i did it while i was on the machine just in case i had to do some more machine work to it so now we're going to do our final work peel off all our stuff throw it away and clean off our area now of course you want to make sure your project piece is very clean when you glue it because we don't want anything to push this thing out so you have any gaps and so that's how we're going to put it together but first we're going to glue it now i use tight bond the interior exterior wood glue tight bond 2. i'll have links for that too i this i prefer exterior glues or the interior exterior because there's moisture in the air sometimes so we're doing a final fit to make sure everything is good and everything is seated all the way around and we are going to fill this puppy up with glue be very generous because you want this thing to seat and you want every bit of that taper to be glued along the full length of the base piece so i make sure that every angle has plenty of glue on it along the entire surface some people use those little brushes to spread the glue i think it's a waste of money there we have it you see how how how the glue is laid out if everything is covered and now we insert the male feather this is where the cool stuff starts to happen we are so close at this point and i hope that you're getting excited about inlays at this point because i've taken you step by step by step by step the thing is is once you get this down it's literally wham bam thank you ma'am it is really easy to do this once you get your design and understand the flow so now of course i'm going to clamp it but i did make a mistake here that i didn't think about i'm clamping directly on good lumber oak and so i left marks with the clamp now checking with the flashlight just make sure everything's seated and you can see that everything is seated very well and the glue is oozing out which is good of course after the glue dried take it apart and the fun the final stages will it come out this is where you get a little anxious did it work right did it work right so i will take my table saw and set the fence just so the base project has a maybe a 0.05 gap roughly of course we're dealing with a open saw blade here and a piece that does not have a base to it the insert will drop down so this is where a lot of safety needs to be taken into consideration and so i was leaning very far away from this particularly on the second side i know that right now it is still going to be held in place by the glue because i'm not cutting through the entire feather but i have my head leaning way to the left and watch this plug fall out and disappear this is where it can get dangerous that's why i'm leaning way out i've been hit by pieces that the saw has thrown once i was cutting steaks look at that there's cutting stakes for tomato steaks and one of those pieces hit me so now we're going to take this out over to the router one more time we got to deal with the long mill so let's clean up our surface our project and we're going to surface it again with the ca glue all the same stuff now this is a surfacing program i'm going to give you as well now we're going to use the one inch surfacing bit this is a bit that i seem to have a hard time holding on to in the store this sells out fast every time i put it on the store and it takes me a while to get it if you need a surfacing bit you are going to need one and you don't have one you can get that one so we're going to set that up now we're zeroing it off the base piece and then i have to set my edge up and i'm just eyeballing it the surfacing program is quite a bit wider than this project here so i left plenty of room for air cuts but i started my program off wrong and so you see i got a little cut where i didn't want it so i had to rewrite it real quick and this is where the fun begins this is it this is the moment you've been waiting for and this is exactly what you're going to have when you do an inlay if you follow these steps look at this thing come to life now do you want to go do an inlay or not look at that that is so cool and i want you to see how crisp it is now i have a little bit of a circle mark there and some streaks from my bit but that's okay we will sand all that out look at this this is off the router not sanded raw look how sharp that works so this video has given you the step-by-step how to do an inlay and i hope you understand it if you didn't make sure you read the information down below download this vector file do what you're supposed to do with it and the final do what i say to do and then we will you will have an inlay project so final thing it's just a little t-slot i'll even include that in the program i will tell you how to do everything on this project of course the final finishing i appreciate you've been hanging around this video but i know that you have been wanting to do an inlay and now you know it's not that hard i it seems like a long video because i was teaching all the steps and there's just lots of little steps along the way i want to make sure you have it so what i like to do is i like to put a quick coat of polyurethane on it first it just acts as a base to seal it i use clear satin a fast drying and in my second coat i will put like lacquer on and i'll put on three coats of lacquer and that seals everything up the rest of the way i could probably just stay with the urethane lacquer gives it the shine i'm not sure i'll stay with the urethane on this because i like the satin you know you can get a lot of reflection out of it and not see the artwork and that my cnc rider brother or sister is how you go from this a couple raw pieces of wood to this to an amazing inlay and i had no idea that the longmail cnc router was capable of doing this if anything has sent home that this machine is capable this project did this is so cool i want you to take a close-up look at this thing again let's take a look i want you to see how fine this stuff look gets this there's not an error on this remember this file with the g code the drawing all the instructions and everything you need is down below in the description all kinds of stuff down below you got to get the machine if you haven't gotten along a cnc router this is the one to get if you've learned something from this video and you are going to be making an inlay give me a thumbs up two of them if you can and a comment down below say i'm going to be making it i really want to see you make this feather the the download is below free to you i want to see pictures of it or whatever inlay that you do i hope you have a great day better tomorrow and go get that file i'm garrett with idc woodcraft talk to you next time you

Channel: CNC Routers, Beginners & Beyond - Garrett Fromme

Views: 34,623

Keywords: cnc router inlay, how to do inlays cnc router, cbc router, how to do inlays, inlay cnc, inlays, cnc router projects, inlay vectric, cnc router, cnc woodworking, wood inlay, cnc inlay, vcarve inlay, vectric, aspire inlay, vcarve desktop, inlay woodworking cnc, inlay woodworking, wood inlay with router, cnc inlay software, easy inlay, inlays vcarve, inlay technique, garrett fromme, cnc routing inlays, how to router inlay, cnc router wood inlays, inlay, inlay projects

Id: Naxq3SbQH50

Length: 74min 59sec (4499 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021