Make a Sign Larger than your CNC

welcome to burger woodworking i got an order for a sign that is 41 inches by 25 inches my cnc machine will only cut 25 by 25 so rather than turn the order down i am using tiling a feature of vcarve desktop in order to make a sign larger than my cnc bit literally i could make a 10 foot long sign as long as it was within the 25 inches of the the width of the bed and you had enough clearance on both sides to to feed the thing through and support it so i'm going to show you how i did this i'll quickly go through how i prepared the boards and then give you an idea of what i sold it for and uh the final product stick with me i bought these boards about three months ago from the local lumber yard and they were quite wet and had to dry in order to be able to use them and paint them so at this point they were around 12 to 13 moisture content which is workable here i set up stops on my chop saw in order to cut them all at the same length this was one of the easiest ways to make sure all your boards are the same you also notice i used the material clamp and tightened it down to hold the board flat and to keep the board from bucking up if i cut too deep too quickly you'll notice i make shallow passes with the chop saw i've learned from experience if there's any kind of warp in the board and you cut too deep too fast your whole saw is going to kick right back up at you now i haven't heard myself but you never know by the way if you're enjoying this video please click the subscribe button it really helps me out thanks okay once you get all the pieces cut i took them over to the joiner made sure it was nice and square because it does go out and you notice i push the protective slide over to check it because sometimes i don't hear it running and the last thing i want to do is get my hands near there while the thing's on here i'm joining the edges to get them nice and flat it usually takes a couple passes to do that you want to look down inside them to make sure that your machine didn't get whacked out of uh straight and run it a couple times get it good and then move on okay next thing you want to do is flatten your boards now you'll notice later in the video i had an issue with these boards not being flat but in retrospect i should have flattened them here glued them up then put them on the cnc machine and flattened the whole thing before i painted them but by the time i had them painted it was too late here i'm using a test board for the domino cutter to make sure i spaced the domino correctly on the face of the board so it cuts in the middle i usually just cut one make sure it's right where i want it and then i'm good to go cutting the rest of the boards when you're using a domino you want to go slow if you push too fast and you're in too much of a hurry you'll get chip outs and some kickback with the machine so take your time one side i cut in the tight fitting so that they just fit right into the slot and the second piece i cut it in a wider fitting which is about an eighth of an inch on each side which gives you a little play room when you're gluing them together the setting right here this is the other side of the board is the wider fitting oh actually it's still on the small fitting and i just remembered it and changed it to the wider fitting which is on now so i'm gonna re-cut that hole and re-cut the first hole no i don't ever make mistakes anyway i think the dominoes they serve two purposes one and the main purpose is it gives you equal spacing all along the board to make sure your your top is perfectly level the bottom sometimes isn't but the top is here i'm gluing up i use titebond 3 glue uh had a lot of success with it supposedly the glue will break the wood will break before the wood actually uh breaks on the seam that you just made so get it together get it square and clamp it up i think i let i normally let these dry overnight i use a wet rag to wipe off the excess although i'm going to be sanding and painting it so it's not like when you're working with a finer furniture where you want to stain it or put clear finish on here i'm ready to take the clamps off the next day and get ready for some light sanding i did have some little imperfections and cracks and stuff so the easiest way since i'm painting it is just fill it with epoxy this is my festool vacuum it's a hepa vacuum and i love it if you can afford one your lungs are worth it get it it sucks all the dust or i should say the majority anyway i sanded the back this is the back of the unit found another couple areas that needed a little more epoxy but you just lightly sanded i wanted the back to be as flat as possible and as you see later it wasn't flat as possible but i filled some holes with some more epoxy and sanded them flat what i should have done at this point after i trimmed it all to the right sizes i should have put it in the cnc machine and flattened it it probably would have taken maybe an eighth of an inch off the top lesson learned here i'm rathering routing the edges uh with a chamfer bit you always want to make sure you're going left to right on a with a router if you try to go the other way it's going to fly right back at you now this is the next day i had spray painted the router i rolled the the whole board with black paint semi-gloss and here i'm rolling the aura mask onto it i was using a foam like ruler to push it on and the it broke so i started using this linoleum roller and what a difference it sticks 10 times better using this thing so i strongly recommend if you're going to do this use use a linoleum roller like that to attach it to the surface you just put the oral mask on roll it your surface has to be clean and level and it seems to work better with semi gloss than flat paint but roll it on real tight and then trim it off with a razor and a straight edge because this is going to be what you trim here is going to be the edge where in my case green paint is going to come up to which is the country club color green and it when you paint the edges you just paint it right up to this now i'm not going to show you the painting i've shown that in other videos but here's where the way you lay it out on your cmc i had to take the front frame off my board that i used to get everything straight and it was at this point that i realized my top was not flat oh or both who knows but it was too late i mean i could have ripped off the aura mask flattened it and repainted the whole thing but i thought i'd try something different so i use these shims it didn't come out perfect but it came out perfect enough here i'm tightening up all the clamps and getting ready to go to the software and create the program first thing you do is create a new file now the bed of the shapoko xxl that i have is 25 by 25 this sign needs to be 22 which will fit in the x axis but i need it to be 41 inches long and i can only cut 25 inches so we use the tiling feature of vcarve desktop so say okay it warns you that you're going bigger than 25 by 25 now you need to open up the tool pass pin it so that it doesn't keep closing on you and select tile tool path you're going to want to tile it and you're going to want to feed it's telling you 25 bigger than 25 say okay you're going to feed it through the y um only doing it that way because that's the way my machine is situated into a corner i can overhang it this way but i can't lay it the other way and go this way depending on how your shapoko or whatever cnc machine you're using you could possibly do it through the x-axis it arbitrarily sets a height of 25 inches i'm going to do an overlap of a quarter inch so 0.25 and that shows you the overlap right there that little beige okay so now i want to move this out of the way so now you lay out your sign the way you want it this one and i'll blow through this quick you want to i want a rectangle that's an inch smaller than the 22 by 41 so it'll be 21 by 40. create it close and if you select it and select alignment tools this center one here will center it perfectly so close that close that now you need another rectangle that's a half inch smaller than this so it'll be 20.5 by 39.5 say create close and if it didn't drop it sometimes it'll drop it somewhere out here select a line hit it to the center and it'll be perfectly aligned so there's your border close that now i already did all of the graphics here so i'm just going to open up save this and call it whatever you want test tile and open up wherever you have the the files that you need and here they are i'm just going to select them all hold down the shift key it didn't catch that one the fern file edit copy file close file open test tile it's warning you again say okay get this out of your way click somewhere over here and hit paste and there's the whole thing now if you hit center it'll move it right into the center and it'll be perfect unfortunately if you look close right there is your break between the two tiles it's going to cut right in the middle of that and right into the middle of the t now if you set everything absolutely dead perfect that will not be an issue but i've found through experience it never works that way so what i would recommend is grab move the whole thing until it's just past the line so you're only here this may be just a little bit more there you go so it's missing all my letters now in the scheme of things when you look at it it's only going to be off a 16th of an inch maybe between the two sides so it's nothing to worry about but it'll make your job easier so the only thing that has to line up when you actually cut it are these two edges now the only other thing you need to add is a hole you need to drill a hole that's going to be a circle and it's going to be exactly a quarter of an inch so set this to a quarter of an inch say create and close it select it move selected option and you want to put this directly on the line and let's say when i created it let's say it wasn't directly on the line it was up here somewhere you want to drag it down until it is on the line now if you notice over here it'll show you the x y well we know the y is 25 so you might as well just set that at 25. the x is how far in from the edge do you want it and i want to make it at least two inches so apply that and it'll be dead on your line at 25 inches which you know it is from down here it says it's 25 and you know you're two inches in from the side close you want to set a drill tool path your depth is an inch and a half so you want to make it one five two tenths that way it'll cut just a little bit into your sacrificial board underneath i'm using a down cut always use a down cut when you're using a mask on your pieces select it and it's the 46202 down cut spiral quarter inch select name it drill hole and calculate it's warning you it's going to cut through say okay i wanted to so there it is now go back you need to select everything else that's already locked hold your shift key select the other one now they're all locked together hold the shift key select that now everything's locked together you want to click on group selected objects now they're all locked now you want to cut your tool path in this case i want to use v-carve and it's pre-selected the 60-degree half-inch which is what i use name it vcarve letters and firm calculate preview all toolpaths and there's what it's going to look like there and then select number two preview all toolpaths and there's the rest of it now notice my frame didn't show up that's because i never did a tool path for it so let's select hold the shift key select the other one lock them together now they're both locked do a tool path you might as well use that quarter inch that you already did i want it to go down roughly an eighth of an inch two one eight eight is uh seven thirty seconds of an inch that seems to be deep enough that if there's any fluctuation in the level of the thing it'll cut down deep enough that you can won't miss it and call this pocket frame calculate preview all tool paths select your tool path 1 preview all tool path and that's what it's going to look like now notice you got a hole right there that's your hole that you're going to use to line everything up that's it close it save it select all your tool paths double check everything sure your hole is right on the the line which it is save tool paths pick where you want to save it i want to save it on my tile sports complex and save close it out now you're ready to go cut it one of the keys to doing a tile is making sure you're set up perfectly on your left x and y axis here i'm using a pointed bit to get it exactly on the edge of the corner uh first time i did this i used a quarter inch bit and i lined up the outer edge of the quarter inch and the whole thing was off about an eighth of an inch so don't do that line it up right if you're using only a quarter inch lighten up right on the middle here i'm using the paper method to find the zero axis or the surface of the wood i used the middle of the board because i was hoping it would be most level there and as it turns out it wasn't quite most level uh here i'm taking off the pointed bit or rather the pointed bit and putting on a my v-carve which is the first thing that's going to be carved on this and it carved the because of the way i laid it out it carved the uh fern first now it's got a quarter inch bit on there and it's carved cutting the edge but you'll notice it skipped a section there in the middle that's because that was a low spot on the board again i should have leveled this thing before i did it but i've learned through experience that if you do a deep enough uh border even if you're off a little bit it's going to catch it on the second or third pass i did a 5 16 depth rather than a quarter inch depth uh so there you see it did catch it way if you haven't subscribed yet please hit the subscribe button it really helps me and i would appreciate it thank you and it doesn't cost you anything anyway it finished cut cutting the quarter inch border and here i'm changing it with the special wrench for the socket which i'll have in the description below if you'd like to order one this is so much easier to change bits with uh than using a plain old wrench gives you a little bit more different edges to catch a hold of and tighten it down and if you do this any length of time you end up using a lot of uh changing bits here's the 60 degree uh cutting the letters and it did an okay job uh it wasn't quite perfect but it was perfect enough again because it wasn't perfectly level but it'll cut them all up right to the edge of the line and i've already cut that little hole which is my lineup hole and we're going to be looking at that right now so it's done cutting tile one which is your first tile so i'm loosening up all my clamps going to slide it forward and change bits again to the quarter inch bit because that's a quarter inch hole and i'm going to want to line up that hole exactly on the hole that was cut in tile one this is now tile two it's good to have a stand like that in your shop to be able to support stuff like this but here i'm jogging my machine over i'm going to take the quarter inch and very slowly lower it do not get crazy and push it too hard because you're going to end up throwing your whole thing out of whack and you're going to have to reinitialize everything but put your quarter inch in a bit get it gently into that hole and once you know you have it perfectly in the hole go ahead and drive it all the way down then you know you're at the exact uh axis that you need to be at to run the tile program so clamp it in tight make sure you're lined up take your time lower it get it in spot here i am tightening everything up double checking everything the first thing you're going to want to do when you do it is line your progra have your program set up so it cuts your outer border first with a quarter inch bit because you already have the quarter inch in there so when you start your program it's going to go over and using the bit setter it'll reset your height based upon the axis you set in the beginning i lowered the shroud so it gets more of the dust now here cutting the outer edge and right away i notice i'm off about a sixteenth of an inch so that means all the lettering is going to be off of 16 of an inch if i keep going so i wanted to make sure exactly how much it was off and it was the 16th so i went ahead and stopped the machine because it had only been running about a minute and reset everything so it was over a 16th of an inch completed it and it was perfect so i've got the 60 degree bit back in there and it's cutting the last rest of the letters and here i'm all done there's a couple more steps you have to take and that's painting the white and the uh gold around the edge which are the color scheme that i use and getting it all ready for a clear coat of finish on top and then you're done obviously after you paint it you peel off the aura mask and clean up any loose you know edges where it didn't quite stick right but here's the finished project i charged 450 for this and if you didn't subscribe please do it it really helps anyway thank you very much

Channel: Barger Woodworking

Views: 17,861

Keywords: cnc machine, cnc machining, diy cnc router, cnc wood router, cnc machine tools, diy cnc, homemade cnc router, cut parts bigger than cnc, too large for cnc, too big for cnc, tiling on a cnc, tiling, Vcarve Desktop, vcarve pro, vcarve pro tutorial, make signs on cnc, cnc machining videos, too big for cnc router, vcarve pro tutorial youtube, make sign bigger than your cnc, shapeoko 3 xxl, shapeoko 3, shapeoko projects

Id: -HgPmAiNbnc

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021