How To Make Clamps For Your CNC Router, Easy CNC Router Projects, [Vcarve & Apsire] - Garrett Fromme

hi i'm garrett with idc woodcraft and i'm glad you've come to this video because we are going to design clamps today for your cnc router you don't need to go out and buy clamps when you can design them up and you have the machine to make them clamp sets can cost a hundred bucks all right you've got the lumber laying around to do this so i'm gonna teach you how to do that and you're gonna learn something else you're gonna learn about arrays now what an array is is when you design one thing up and then you essentially just copy the entire item multiple times exactly how you want it to copy so array is something most cnc router owners don't really mess with because they don't really get it it does take a little bit of your noodle to wrap around it a little bit but you're going to get it by the end of the day and you're going to have 12 clamps because we're going to do this 5 inch and we're going to do this 3 inch here so this is what we're going to be designing today this set of clamps and by the time it comes off the router it's going to look exactly like this so just to give you a heads up of where we're going the first thing we're going to do is design up this one clamp right here with three rectangles the first rectangle is going to be the body of the clamp the second rectangle will be the slot and the third rectangle will be this step on the clamp or a clearance area and then what we're going to do is we're going to copy it over to here and then make adjustments to make it a three inch clamp and then we're going to use the array function to do all these clamps here and then we're going to run it out on the cnc router so one thing i want to tell you right up front this was actually a very challenging video to make to try to get explanations out i got to say i probably recorded the entire thing six times and i still struggled with it so wherever you are challenged at understanding what i'm saying i truly truly apologize because um yeah i just came to a point where i was spending literally two days on this thing so hopefully by the end you'll have a set of clamps and well i'm sure you will if you just follow through with this and yeah so let's just kind of jump on into this we're going to start off with a blank slate and get started first thing we're going to do is we're going to use our material and set up our job material size we're going to assume we bought a piece of 12 inch by 12 inch pine that is three quarters inch thick from the one of the local hardware stores now one of the first things i want you to know is if you buy that type of thing and it says three quarters of an inch rarely is it going to be three quarters of an inch it's going to vary anywhere between 5 8 of an inch and three quarters of an inch so we want to keep that in account when we're setting our job up and so i'm setting up the 12 by 12 which is the numbers i have here and i have three quarters of an inch listed here and i'm in inches but i am setting this off at the bottom of the material or on the spoil board surface and the reason i want to do that as opposed to setting a three-quarter inch thing and set my router bit off the top is because if the material is thinner by the time this job is done cutting we will have cut shapes into our spoil board so we want to avoid doing that we are also going off the lower left corner of the material and we're going to select ok so the first thing we want to do is create our basic clamp so that's going to start here in the lower left corner and i want my first clamp to start one inch in the x direction and one inch in the y direction so the corner of the clamp will be here and the rest of the clamp goes up in this direction here so what we're going to do is go into our create vectors and the draw rectangle click that and the first thing you see is we have a rectangle here with the rounded buttons or the radio buttons around the perimeter on the corners and one in the center we're going to select the lower left corner and the reason is is wherever point i pick now the clamp will draw based on that lower left corner i'm going to show you right now just by the default settings whatever's in here if i click right here the lower left corner of the clamp is going to be right there let me just change something it's going to be right there and if i click there's our rectangle now if i change this to the center now the rectangle is going to be built based on the center of wherever i pick so i'm right there and you see the rectangle is now based is built off the center of whatever i picked and again if i pick the upper left corner upper right corner the rectangle will be built from the upper right corner just like that so now you understand what these radio buttons do i'm going to control z control z control z to undo i'm going to pick the lower left corner i want it to start at one inch in and one inch up so in the x i put in a one in the y i put in a one now my clamps are going to have rounded corners on them so i'm going to select the rounded external right there and i want the round in we'll just put a half inch radius 0.5 the length of the clamp is going to be 5 inches long and it's going to be 1.25 inches wide so now when i click create the clamp is going to be created exactly where i want it to start at right at this point right here i hit create and there it is now if i just picked anywhere and here the clamp will just be created wherever i pick at just like that i'm going to ctrl z and i'm going to well i'm not going to close it yet we need to create another area because we need the clearance area and our slot so first let's create our slot the slot is going to be based on the center of the clamp right from this cross hair that has just popped up so in order to make these crosshairs pop up and do this exactly the way we want it to do it we have to have our snaps turned on right up here where i'm showing you both of these boxes should be highlighted we'll have a little blue color in them and they'll have boxes around them you know the difference because if i click it right now and there's no box around that one the snap is turned off click it again there's a box around it the snap is on and i want to make my slot based on the center of the rectangle so this time i'm going to select the center radio button right there and it automatically populated this area right here and we're going to leave it like that the corners the ends we can have them square we can have them round it doesn't really matter we're going to be cutting inside the slot and a round tool cannot cut a square corner but i'm going to make it rounded to make it look natural we're going to use a quarter inch diameter down cutting end mill on this entire job so my radius is going to be 0.125 and now we set the length it's going to be four and a half inches long and the width is going to be the bolt size which will be at .25 inches now i'm gonna make that a little bit bigger to give clearance for the bolts i'm going to type in 0.26 and instead of hitting the create button down here what we're going to do is because we have our snaps turned on you're going to see your cursor is going to start grabbing different points and we want this to grab the center point of the rectangle both side to side and up and down you can see now i've dashed lines that means that it is now picking the center point all i need to do is just hit my left mouse button once and there's our slot so i don't really like that length so i'm going to change it to four inches and i'm going to hit create apply what that's going to do is change the rectangle right now the rectangle is highlighted that means it's still referring to that rectangle i hit apply and you can see now it shortened it up to a length that i like much better now what we're going to be working on is the step down on the clamp or what we call clearance area so that's going to be this area and the clamp right here where it steps down from here it does a little drop off so basically that clearance cutout is going to start at this lower left corner and it's going to come up to the very edge of that slot right up in here and if we do our math right now from here to the edge of that slot is four and a half inches we can verify that by closing the rectangle and going into our dimension measure the distance click that and just select this vector right here let it find the center point and you'll know it when your cursor changes to like a crosshair we're going to click that and now you can see it's grabbed that point and we're going to come over here and we're going to do the same thing right over here and we're going to find that little center point which is right there click that and it says over here 4.5 inches that's how big this rectangle needs to be so we're going to close that go back into rectangle it's going to start at the 1 one coordinate so up here we need one and one and we're going to select the radio button and this is going to be 4.5 long and 1.25 tall and if we just hit create it's going to put it exactly where we want it to be which it just did we're going to close that all right so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to copy this clamp over to here and then we're going to shorten it up but first i want to get things put on a different layer so the first one is going to be the slot we're going to highlight the slot and then right click on our mouse and a menu is going to pop up currently everything is put on one layer and we want to create new layers so that we can work with our tool paths much easier so i've right clicked and down at the bottom it says move to layer and right now it only says layer 1. that means we only have one layer so we're going to create a new layer so we hit new layer and we are going to call it slot you get this little pop-up box we call it slot and we're going to change the color so we can tell that it's on its own layer and we click ok now when i hit escape you see i've got an orange slot we're going to do the same to the clearance rectangle i'm going to click that right click that and go to the move to layer and we're going to create a new layer again and this one's going to be called clearance we're going to change this color to a green we'll make it a yeah green looks okay and click ok and now we have that okay now it's time to get into the array function so the first thing i want you to understand about arrays there are two types there's a circular array and a rectangular array we are going to be doing in a rectangular array and in a rectangular array you have two elements you have columns and rows a column is always up and down and a row is always side to side so if you have multiple clamps going side to side that's all considered one row if you have multiple clamps stacked on top of each other that's considered one column however right now we've got one component that's still considered one row and one column it doesn't matter if we have one or a thousand it's still considered a column in a row but i hope that made sense so we're going to make a second column that's going to be on one row we're basically going to copy this clamp over to here so we're going to use the rectangular array and that's going to be down in the offset and layout area and you're going to use this button called array copy the first field up here are numbers that you can play with but don't don't worry about it right now i'll explain what they do they will pick out the the maximum rectangle that everything fits into let me just give you an example i'm going to create a circle up here and i'm going to go back into the array and now you can see i've got a circle here it's got a specific diameter and the numbers that are now in here are 1.8 and 1.8 that tells me that the pick box area right now for doing an array is the 1.8 measured from side to side to the maximum size and 1.8 up and down now if i select everything these numbers are going to change and they're going to be kind of weird numbers one is the x is 5.07 and some change so the maximum distance is from the edge of the circle to the edge of this clamp since the edge of the circle overlaps or goes beyond this side of the clamp and again with the y it takes it from the bottom of the clamp to the very top of the circle and that's what this number represents so what we're going to do is i'm going to first delete that circle i hope that kind of made sense to you we know that our clamp is 5 long and 1.25 tall so when i select that now you're going to see it says 5 and 1.25 it's the maximum size of everything that it picks up based on a rectangle so remember i was talking about rows and columns we're going to put another clamp over here that means it's going to be in one row but it's going to have two columns so in the row and column area we're going to say one row and two columns the next thing is we have a gap and an offset so what i want to do is make this clamp start one inch from the edge of this clamp so i've got a one inch gap between the two so when you want a gap you're going to select the gap feature the offset does something a little different the offset will basically just move it make the copy whatever distance you specified so let's just show you what i mean right now we have a one and a one in the x and y so that means that if i have multiple rows of multiple columns it's going to create an offset of one inch right now it's just going to create one in the row direction because we're it's building a second column when i create hit the copy button you see that it just created another one but they're overlapped i am using the offset feature and i'm telling to offset the copy by one inch so the distance from here to here is one inch now if i control z that and i switch over to gap without changing anything else and i click copy now it made it over there it created a gap between the two because i told it to create a gap by selecting gap and that's exactly what i want so now we have our second clamp built however we don't want this clamp to be five inches we want it to be three inches long so what we're going to do is we're going to go alter these and we have a lower left corner right now i'm going to close this and we're going to go into rectangle first of all and we have let's i want to select that rectangle i had to escape to select the rectangle and now our clamp rectangle is highlighted and you can see these little buttons right here that means that while we're in rectangle mode it is going to do whatever we want to that rectangle it's not going to add a new one so basically what we're going to do now is we're going to change the dimension of that you can see over here it says it's five inches long and 1.5 inches wide we're going to change that number to 3 and we're going to apply and what it did just change this rectangle based on this lower left corner this is where it gets a little goofy and you may have to practice with this a little bit but watch what happens i'm going to ctrl z and i'm going to select the middle radio button and what it's going to do is going to shrink it down from both sides i'm going to click apply oh i have to change my number to three it's going to default to whatever size it is so now you see it did it based on the center of the rectangle so i'm going to do control z i'm going to go back to the corner and i'm going to change that to 3 and i'm going to say apply i'm going to select this right i have to get out of rectangle first to select a new rectangle and then go back into it and that means that rectangle is now the one that's being controlled and this thought needs to be just two inches long so we're gonna change the number to 2 and we're going to apply while we're selecting the lower corner and finally we need to select the third rectangle and change that one so that is going to be 2.5 long and we're going to apply and now that rectangle is built now i clicked down here by accident and that's why that other rectangle popped up if you don't exit out and select your rectangle before you go into rectangle it's going to create a new rectangle always so now we have both clamps that we want so now it's time to array them into multiple rows we will still have two columns so let's go select all these guys we're going to do the array function again down in offset and layout and click array copy and now thinking we can do seven of these so we're going to select in rows seven and columns are still going to be two we only want two up and downs but we want multiple rows and we're going to go with offset again and we want so what that'll do is that'll stack them the way we want to and the distance between them let's just say i'm using a quarter inch diameter end mill uh we can use a a 0.75 so for the offset we're going to say 0.75 we're just going to type in both fields and we're going to click copy so now you see it made a whole bunch the reason is is because i had two columns selected okay this is where i made the mistake right now i have both items selected it's considered one column when i had two columns it created this column and it created this column so i need to change columns to one and then i click create again now you can see these clamps are running way off and i'm going to have a quarter inch extra material so what i'm going to do is i'm going to shorten that gap up we're going to make it a point 625 0.625 i'm going to create and we have a 0.625 gap between each one of them and so we're going to get one two three four five six out of this board so i'm gonna close that click off of that and i'm just gonna grab these two and delete them and now let's just center everything up on our board so i grab everything and under transform objects we're going to select the align selected objects button and right up here we're just going to align it to the center of the material you watch when i click it everything is going to move just like that so the clamps are now designed out it's time to do our tool paths so i wanted to stop for a second and just ask you if you feel like this video is helping you out to understand some things like array function and a little bit more about rectangles then maybe you can give me a thumbs up and a comment and by the way if you like don't want to design up your own clamps the g-code for this project is going to be available for you on etsy as well as the vector file so yeah the link is going to be down below in the description so you can just like get it basically i'll have it set up as a plug and play you load it up on your machine and hit go but you'll have instructions on how to do that okay well thumbs up if you feel this is helpful so far let's get back to this so the first thing we want to do is cut out our clearance area the reason we're going to cut the clearance area first is because we don't need to cut the slots from the very top of the material all the way down we want to start them from the surface the clearance area so in order to do the clearance area the first thing we want to do is turn off our layers that aren't clearance area and we're going to select the pocket button right here because this is going to be a cop pocket cut it's going to cut out all the material inside of that rectangle without cutting like the corners because a round tool doesn't cut the corner but in this case what we're going to have on our clamp is a slight radius we can compensate for that but i'm not going to in this video in the file that i give you will have that compensated for you if you purchase the one i create off of etsy we're in a pocket tool path and we're just going to select everything and we're going to use our quarter 10 mil and we're going to go half the material so it's going to be 0.375 which is the thickness divided by 2. you can also go z divided by 2 and enter oops take that back and z divided by 2 now you can't do that 0.375 just got to put in that number now because i don't care about finish i can be aggressive i can have a high step over so i'm going to go into my library not the library but just the router bit itself and i'm going to make sure i'm coming at a nice high feed rate so i am at 50 inches per minute my past depth is 1.8 inches so it's going to make two passes and my plunge rate is 30 inches per minute i'm good with that that means it's going to make a nice fast pass my step over 70 percent i'm going to go to 80 percent i'm going to click ok so you can use either client more conventional on this with this kind of step over we're going to ramp into it and our ramp is going to be the diameter of the router bit i don't want to plunge drive right into the material especially when i'm using a down cutting bit and we're going to change the name of this to clearance and we'll calculate and run that and now we've got some slots not slots we just have our clearance cuts so that's good now we're going to close that we're going to split our screen and we are going to switch layers to the slot layer we're going to turn that on and turn the other one off and we're going to select our slots so we're going to select profile for this and we want this to be inside that means it's going to cut inside the slots and this is going to go all the way through the material but however we have a start point of 0.375 it's going to start at this surface right here which is already 0.375 deep so you change that to 0.375 and then we go the rest of the way which is 0.375 a lot of people get confused here these two numbers get added together to get the depth that you want we're going to go into our tool path it says we're going to do it in three passes let's take a look at our feeds the speed so the feed is at 50 now the plunge rate in this case is also at 50 and i want that to be at 50 for what i'm doing and so we're going to corkscrew into it and when we a corkscrew is basically a constant plunge rate at an angle which i'll explain in a moment and i've explained it quite a bit in other videos so we'll just set that up and i'll show you what i mean i'm going to do a ramp in we're going to select that and we're going to select spiral so what that's going to do is going to go as plunge feed rate on a spiral all the way in when i click ok or calculate if you've run a vectric at all you know the cyan lines are your plunge rates and if the plunge rate is very small this is going to take a very long time to cut these slots because it's going to constantly do a long plunge around like that to cut out this slot this is a technique i prefer using over a direct plunge and then feeding around because it leaves surfaces much cleaner and if i regenerate that tool path you can see that i've got a nice little setup and we are really close to being done the next thing is now is to do the outside so i close that and i'm going to go to layers and i'm going to turn everything off turn layer one on which is the body of the clamp and we're going to select everything there and we're going to do a profile again and this time the profile is going to be on the outside we are going to start at zero and this is gonna go z equals and that's the thickness of the material and it's gonna do it in six passes let's take a look at our feeds and speeds we really want the same settings 50 50 the step over doesn't matter when we're doing this and we are on the outside of the clamp we're going to ramp in on a spiral it's going to do the exact same things to spiral all the way down but this time we want to add tabs to it because this is where we're cutting parts out so you click the tabs button and we're just going to go into that and we're going to add three tabs and see where it places them so we click that and it's put three tabs on our clamps that's beautiful i'm very happy with that i don't necessarily want my tabs to be at a radius but i'm going to leave it there and i'm going to just close that now the tab size i don't like big thick tabs so this is only 0.1 wide and maybe a 0.15 tall i'm going to make them thinner i'm making 0.125 tall and we're going to just add the tabs again now we already did that the tabs are there we set up the calculation we're going to name this as cut out and calculate and you see it's corkscrewing all the way down and again and it already set up its own optimal tool path i'll explain how this thing optimizes these things in other videos so we're going to just preview that toolpath now this is probably going to be the longest operation but there's our clamps let's see how long this is going to take we go to the clock and overall this will take 35 minutes to cut this that's not bad at all all right let's get this out on the router oh we have to save it first so all this uses the quarter inch down bit so you want to have everything selected go to your save button hit save all tool paths are selected and it says up here select uh visible tool paths so that's what i have selected it's selected everything is checked down here and we save the tool paths and we're going to call clamps i already had one there because i had to practice this and rehearse it first that file is saved now let's put it on the router so we've got a board clamp down now obviously it's bigger than 12 by 12. using some clamps that i made before that i didn't like and i just remind you if you would just rather just run these clamps out for yourself without having to do any design work the program is available on etsy the link is down below so i'm gonna set the bit zero z on the spoil board and i want you to take a look you see these lines on my spoil board those are grid lines if you don't have a grid line on your spoil board you're working way too hard i have a video that you'll want to see and the flag is going to pop up right now to show you not only how to set it up but why you want grids now we are using a quarter inch down bit for this entire job we're zeroed out now and we're starting to run so the first operation is the step on the clamp or the clearance area and now we're getting into the slot and this is where you can start to see this ramp down spiral type of cut you notice that when you are doing cuts your router has to plunge in but you see this isn't plunging at all it's just tapering down around a spiral it's much easier on the router and you can tell that it's doing that because it's feeding back and forth right now and you see the collet is just slowly turning so here we're just showing that again and you see it's just slowly going into the cut back and forth you run a list less risk of issues with this too when you're doing a straight plunge you can have some bounce around as it's plunging and it can kind of mess up some holes so now we're doing our cut out and this is the longest part of the job maybe 15 minutes to do all 12 of these clamps and then i just took my utility knife and cut the tabs that's why i like to make small tabs makes them very easy to remove and there's the clamp all we have to do is a little bit of cleanup so after i sanded them there's just lots of ways you can use step clamps as opposed to flat clamps there you go now you know how to make clamps be a great first project if this video was helpful to you give me a thumbs up and a comment and have a great day

Channel: CNC Routers, Beginners & Beyond - Garrett Fromme

Views: 15,871

Keywords: cnc router projects, how to make clamps for cnc router, how to design clamps in vcarve, cnc router projects start to finish, cnc projects, cnc projects for beginners, projects for cnc routers, how to make cnc router clamps, how to make cnc clamps, cnc router, easy cnc router projects, cnc woodworking projects, start to finish cnc router projects, first CNC router project, good cnc router projects, vcarve tutorial, vectric tutorial, aspire tutorial, garrett fromme

Id: b9miRXZGd1I

Length: 34min 20sec (2060 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021