Profitable CNC Projects: How To Create Address Signs On Shapeoko 5 Pro! | Brett's Laser Garage

hey everybody welcome back to the channel and welcome to my new series called beginner CNC and Laser projects that sell in this series I'm going to take you through CNC and Laser projects that beginners can make that actually sell we'll be working from start to finish showing every step in the process from design to creation and I'm also going to be uploading the files for for free in the description below so you can create these projects for yourself for fun for family or even maybe to sell if you're new to cnc's or lasers or just interested in the process this is going to be for you in this video we're going to be creating a wooden address sign using the shapo 5 Pro CNC using carbide crate I'm going to take you through the design process of this file we're also going to be talking about work holding flattening pocketing chamfering and Contour tool paths I'm also going to show you how I stained the project and finished it so first things first let's get into the design all right so here we are in carbide create and here is our Design This is the address sign if we go into the tool paths tab up here we can go ahead and simulate this to show you what this is going to look like so we just have a simple rectangle with a pocket tool path in the middle which exposes the raised letters we have some tabs in here and we also have a chamfer around the edge so now that I've showed you what we're going to make let's go ahead and design it so before we start designing anything let's go ahead and go to our project setup I like to do this first before we do anything so we're going to set up our stock size my piece of wood that I'm going to be using for this project is 16 in wide and it's 7 and 1 E tall in height it's 1 in thick we have our zero set to the top we have our tool path zero set to the bottom left corner this is almost always where I set my tool paths um material I'll just go ahead and put hardwood we have the shape boo 5 Pro our retract height is going to be3 Ines and that all looks good so design wise the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create our rectangle I'm going to use the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that is 14 in wide by 6 in tall and I'm going to Center that on our work area so this is the outside perimeter of our sign you could see that it is well within our piece of stock that we're using and that is so I'm able to clamp around the outside of my piece without it interfering with any of these Cuts here this perimeter cut I'll show you that later when we go to set up the actual piece on the work bed so we have our rectangle we want to make this interior rectangle here because this is going to be our pocket it's kind of like a border around the whole sign so we're going to click on our rectangle we're going to go over here to the offset tool the offset Vector tool we're going to click on that and we want to create an offset that's 3/4 of an inch to the inside we're going to apply this and boom that's going to draw another rectangle 3/4 of an inch inward from the original rectangle that we drew and next thing we got to do are our numbers here so we're going to go to the text tool and we're going to type in our address so obviously this is in the right size so you can either change the size in here in the font height section of the text window or since that's now too big we can go ahead and click on the scale button here and we can just scale it this way if we would like or you can actually type in here the size that you want it let's say I wanted it 10 in wide and it scales proportionately so let's go ahead and make this a little bit smaller going back to the text also you can change your font here any custom font that you load on your computer will actually populate into this menu I'm going to pick Century Gothic so now we want to Center this in our rectangle I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going to highlight the inside rectangle so now both of these are highlighted I'm going to go to our our align vectors tab I'm going to align this both horizontally and vertically and really that's the majority of the design work we're doing on this beginner project and lastly here we are going to add some tabs to our outside perimeter so we want to make sure that our outside Vector is selected and we're going to go down here to the menu to the edit tabs button and then we are just going to add tabs on the outside side of our project for this I just like to do four so that is the design now let's go ahead and assign tool paths to all of these vectors here so next we're going to go into the tool path menu I already have my tool path set up over here for our original file so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and disable all of these and I'm going to add another group okay so first the first tool path we're going to create is our pocket so I'm going to click on our inner rectangle and our numbers highlight those and I'm going to click on the pocket tool path we're going to use current selection and I'm going to edit our tool here we are going to use a 2011 endmill that's the endmill that comes with your shapco it's a quarter inch down cut we're going to select that we're going to leave leave our tool parameters just stock because for beginner projects I do like to just leave these at the stock setting as you become more comfortable feel free to go ahead and up these speeds or to change them as you desire but for right now we're just going to leave them stock because they do a great job in the stock settings and our start depth is going to be the top of the material our max depth is going to be .15 in we're going to call this our number pocket and as you can see our tool path has generated here if we go to simulation we can see now we have a pocket cut in the middle of the wood in our rectangle and our numbers are now raised okay so one thing to note here is you'll see in the numbers you're going to have some rounded areas like this so this is a little bit rounded because we're using a/ qu in endmill to pocket out this material so that's the shape of the bit that's the shape of the endmill that can't quite get into this inside corner here so what you can do is you could use an e inch endmill and that would get create a smaller semicircle here because the bit is only an eighth of an inch in diameter but it's going to take a lot longer to create this pocket with an e/ inch inm let me show you what that looks like now so if we change our tool to a number 1028 inch you can see our tool path is now changed we're going to simulate this we're now at 94 minutes to do this pocket we have a little bit better crispness to our numbers but it's still got you know a little bit of a round feature there but 94 minutes is just way too long I don't think it really looks that much better really so we're going to go ahead and change this back to a/ quarter inch in carbide create Pro they have a feature that is called rest Machining and that's really neat because what it'll allow you to do is to use a E8 in or excuse me a/4 inch endmill for the majority of this pocket but then you can select just these areas here where you need to get in a a little bit tighter and you can machine these with an E8 in or a 16th inch endmill but it's only going to use that smaller tool just where it needs it here so it saves a ton of time but that is a feature in the pro version which I do not have and in this case I think it looks just fine I'm okay with that design so we're going to leave it the way it is the next thing we're going to do is we're going to create a finishing tool path so we're cutting down .15 in into our stock to create this pocket so sometimes that'll leave a little bit of a rough pocket in the bottom which requires a little bit of sanding and that's never fun to do when you have you know all these little spaces to get around you're trying to go go around all these numbers it's kind of a pain in the butt so we're going to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate our tool path here and I'm going to call this number pocket finishing pass we're going to edit our tool path and we are going to start our depth at .15 and we're going to finish our max depth at16 so we're only going down 100th of an inch next thing I'm going to do is edit our tool settings we're going to keep the quter inch endmill but I'm going to turn the step over down to 0.1 I'm going to leave depth per pass cuz we're only going down 01 so it's going to do this in one pass we're going to change our feed rate to 25 that's pretty fast but we're only taking off that little sliver here so it can handle it so you can see if I disable our main tool path here here's our finishing pass these lines here are a little bit tighter cuz we changed our step over that's going to create just a little bit cleaner of a cut by stepping over 0.1 instead of 0.12 like we were doing before I'm going to go ahead and reenable our first pocket tool path okay so now we are done with these these two our we have our pocket and our finishing pass on our pocket next thing we're going to do is we are going to create a chamfer around this so we're going to click on our outside border we're going to go to Tool paths we're going to hit we're going to press Contour I'm going to change my tool to a 90° vbit I'm going to leave the settings stock here stock hardwood settings but our max depth I'm going to only put 0.1 and and we are going to cut on our line so we're going to cut with no Offset you can see that moved our Blue Line directly onto our Vector here if we click on outside right it's going to cut on the outside if we cut on the inside obviously it's going to move to the inside we don't want that we want to do no offset we want this to be the same size rectangle that we originally set it as we want to cut right on that line 0.1 in a tenth of an inch and that's going to give us our chamfer we are also going to want to make sure we click on ignore tabs if we don't the V bit is going to skip everywhere we put those tabs on here so this will create one continuous border outline with the vbit and we'll go ahead and change this tool path to chamfer so we'll simulate this you can see we have our pocket and also the small little chamfer around the border now I like to add our chamfer at this stage because our entire workpiece is supported really well at this point our main piece of wood is going to be clamped down to the table you know we've only pocketed just a shallow amount in the middle here so our board is fully stable one thing that you could do is you can create your your Contour cut around the outside perimeter and leave your tabs in place but then when you come back to do this chamfer tool path you only have those tabs supporting the piece so you're running the risk of the part actually breaking out and coming loose ruining your part so I do like to do the chamfer at this point I think it's worth doing at this point even though it's an extra tool change that you have to do just for stability purposes so the last tool path we're going to be creating is our cutout our Contour cutout so we're going to click on our outside border again click on Contour use current selection we're going to keep our 2011 endmill this time though we're going to start at the top but we're going to cut down all the way through so we're going to go 1 in and we want to make sure we go all the way through so we're going to go down about um 200 of an inch so 1.02 we're going to have our offset Direction set to outside right this is going to cut again on the outside of our line here so that this piece will be a true 14 in wide by 6 in tall we're going to call this our perimeter cutout and if we look at our simulation here is our completed part and you can see our tabs holding this in place our pocket and our chamfer so that's it we've gone ahead and recreated our all the tool paths for assigned we're pretty much ready to go there's one more bonus tool path that I'm going to throw in here now now you might have noticed this other rectangle that I that I had down here so what this is going to represent is a flattening tool path one of the great things about the CNC is it gives you the ability to actually flatten stock in much of the same way that you would use a jointer and planer combination in order to get some flat pieces of material so what I've gone done is created a rectangle and I'm going to change that size to just about a/4 in bigger than my stock now I'm going to create another tool path I'm going to do a pocket I'm going to change my tool to my flattening bit that I have it is a 1 and 1/2 in surfacing bit I'm going leave these parameters the same and I'm going to rename this flattening I'm going to start have my start depth be at the top and I'm just going to go down 0 05 5,000 of an inch I'm going to call this flattening all right so I'm going to disable my other tool paths here so this isn't mandatory but if you want to make sure your stock is perfectly flat you can run this flattening tool path over the front side and the back side of your stock before you do anything else before you run any of these other tool paths so I put this at the top in my video explanation that we're going to do next I'm going to show you how to do this if you want to how to secure your piece during the flattening setup and then how to secure your piece during the other tool paths this is not mandatory but it is a nice little tip to know having your material perfectly flat will help out when you go to pocket out these numbers so there's no high and low spots this is really important especially when you're doing stars or VC carving in general if your stock is not flat if there's highs and lows dips and Valle in it you'll notice that on your vcarve they won't be totally consistent so having a nice flat surface is going to help alleviate that in this case it's probably not too important cuz you're not really going to notice slight variations in the height of this pocket here but like I said it's a good tip to know so that's why I'm going to explain it in the demo coming up next and I will have this flattening tool path included in the free file that you can download but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to leave it disabled like I have here in my list of tool paths if you'd like to use it just go ahead and enable and disable the other ones uh first all right so let's get this saved and throw it on the CNC and get a cut all right so here's our stock for the project this is a piece of I believe it's red oak I'm not sure exactly it's some sort of Oak but it'll be good for outdoors so it's going to be good for this little address sign here but we're going to start out with an example of how to do the flattening pass on this so I'm going to have two different types of work holding for this project the first is I'm going to be applying sideways pressure to this board because I'm going to be surfacing the entirety of this board and I don't want anything to get hit so let me bring you in closer I'm going to show you how I'm going to secure this to the CNC so I'm going to use the bottom left corner of my CNC to run this job and you can see here I have these 3D printed dogs that go in these holes on my waist board so this is going to create a bottom fence for this board to be held against on the left side here in the track I just have some of these Square stops from carbide 3D which is going to give me a stopping point here on the left side if you're interested in this wasteboard design make sure you check out my other video I explain it in detail and also give out the file so you can make this for yourself okay so now that our piece the wood is up against the fence it's not going to move down and it's not going to move to the left we need to make sure we put pressure on it in both of those directions so that way it doesn't move so to do that we're going to use these crush it clamps by carbide 3D and this is just a clamp that is secured down to the wasteboard and it pushes forward on the material so I'm going to be pushing it this way to the left and I'm also going to be pushing it down towards me up against these dogs and that's what's going to hold it in place let me show you how these go together so on the right side I'm going to secure this down to the threaded inserts that I have in my waist board and this is another reason why I really like this wasteboard design because if I just had the stock slats in here you know this piece can only go into the T trck in that example and in this particular case my T trck is so close to the right side of my board that I'm not going to be able to get I'm not not going to be able to attach it that way so I have these other two holes here along the entirety of all of my slots here that gives me other clamping options so I'm going to place it in this threaded insert location and screw it down like so as you tighten this screw here it's actually going to put Force to left and that's going to put pressure against the stops that I have on the left side so I'm just going to tighten this a little bit just put a little bit of pressure here the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put two more clamps up at the top to press down so let's go ahead and put two more in at the top now the this piece is secure it is not going anywhere and these clamps are low enough below the surface of the wood that our surfacing bit can cover this entire piece without hitting anything all right so before we switch to our flattening bit and I'm going to be using a 1 and 1/2 inch flattening bit from IDC Woodcraft I'll leave it in the description below if you're interested in picking this up I'm going to set my X and Y Z at this point because right now I have a/ quinch endmill installed in the spindle it'll make it a lot easier to do that at this point so in this example ex Le to set zero I'm going to do this manually now carbide 3D does sell a probe an XYZ touch probe that will help you set your X and Y and Z zeros but you can also do it manually and it's not that hard so just in case you don't have that I'm going to show you the oldfashioned way how to do it so we have our material down on the bed we're just going to jog our machine and we're going to eyeball it to where it's exactly on this bottom left corner because that is our origin of the [Music] job and that looks pretty good right there remember this design it's not critical that you get the X and y0o point just dead on because going back to when we designed the file we made our stock large enough and our project small enough to fit inside of that stock so we leave room for the clamps and we leave room for small amounts of air in the XY so that's why I always like to keep my stock a little bit oversized in my projects just a little bit smaller again for clamping and it also helps setting the X and Y so you don't have to be so precise other situations that's really really important in this case it's not so now that we have the X and Y zeroed out let's go ahead and switch over to our surfacing bit so when you're using a surfacing bit to say surface your entire wasteboard it's really important to turn off your bit Setter and also remove it from the machine that way the surfacing bit does not come in contact with it in this case my material is so far off on the opposite end of the bed I'm still going to disable it because I'm going to set the z0 point manually but I don't need to actually take it off the machine because I'm not getting anywhere close to it so to manually set our Z height what we're going to do is I've jogged our machine over to our work area I'm going to lower the bit down and use just a regular piece of coffee paper here and I'm going to lower the bit down and move my piece of pap paper just to see where it barely kisses the paper and I start to feel some tension that's where I'm going to set my zero point okay and I'm getting pretty close so I'm going to switch my jog settings down to 01 and I'm going to continue going down and there we go now I'm touching just barely touching that is where I'm going to set my zzero all right so finally before we run this flattening file what I want to do is just take a pencil and draw some squiggly lines over the top surface of my piece of wood so that way I know that my flattening bit has actually touched every surface on top of the wood if after one pass I look at my piece of wood and not all of the pencil Mark has been erased I'm going to go ahead and reset my zero down and run the file again I'm going to do that as many times as I need to in order to flatten this piece out I do anticipate though that this piece is already pretty flat it should just take one or two passes all right now the top of our board is nice and flat all our pencil marks are removed now what we got to do is unclamp this flip it over and do this one more time so both the top and the bottom are [Music] [Music] flat all right so there we have it our board is nice and flat and we're ready to move on to the next steps so while I have this clamped up to the CNC I'm going to go ahead and sand it up to 120 grip and then I'm going to apply some black stain to the entire board now I'm doing this because I want the border to be black and I also want the numbers to be black so I'll stain the entire surface black the router will pocket out the material so I'll have a nice two-toned effect now this is just regular Minwax gel stain I do like to use the gel stain because it does not run as much of as the watery waterbased stuff does so let's go ahead and get this thing sanded and stained up and move on to the next step we're now ready to go ahead and actually run the project so I've loaded the file into carbide motion reset my z-axis zero to start off I have the number 20114 in down cut endmill installed okay so real quick before we start so right now I'm using the crushit clamps to apply side Force to both my stops on the X and Y AIS and this is a really good stable clamping platform just in case you don't have these clamps I'm going to change the clamping setup here I'm going to use the regular essential clamps that come with the machine and I'm going to install these on top of the material in order to place clamping Force downward and that's really going to lock this piece in it's a second option and since my file is smaller and it fits within my stock here with some good room on the outside I'm able to use these clamps without any fear of them being hit as we're watching the CNC run remember if you're liking this video so far please give it a thumbs up and if you haven't already please consider subscribing so you don't miss out on [Music] anything so before I do the next tool change I'm going to insert the 90° V bit to do the chamfer I just want to bring you in close here and show you how clean of a cut this leaves where I pocketed out the material doing that second finishing pass really makes a big difference now what also makes a really big difference is using the/ qu inch upcut bit so you'll notice that there's some fuzzies on the top of the material because an upcut cut bit pulls the wood fibers up now that leaves a little bit of a rough finish on the top of the material but it leaves the bottom of the material very smooth so in this case I chose to use the upcut bit in order to limit the amount of postprocessing or sanding that we're going to need to do inside this pocket and I'll show you how we're going to deal with those fuzzies on the top in a minute let's go ahead and put in the 90° V bit and run the chamfer tool path [Music] and lastly let's get this thing out of the clamps and get those tabs cut [Music] okay we're almost done we're going to take a random orbital sander and smooth out these edges take off some of those remaining tab bits that we got here throw a coat of finish on it so what do you think pretty easy right I love this simple beginner CNC project and I've sold dozens of them without even trying just Word of Mouth I'm not saying you're going to be rich off this idea or anything like that but I know it's a solid product and if someone's got a house it's a perfect gift form if you have any questions you want me to explain something in more detail or you just want to say what's up make sure you leave a comment down below I'd love to hear from you and hey let me know if there's a CNC or laser project that you'd like to see me do and maybe we can add it in the series in the future thanks a lot for watching I'll see you on the next [Music] [Music] one

Channel: Brett's Laser Garage - Lasers, CNCs, and More!

Views: 10,793

Keywords: Profitable CNC Projects, How To Create Address Signs On Shapeoko 5 Pro, Brett's Laser Garage, CNC, Projects, CNC Address Sign Tutorial, Shapeoko 5 Pro Projects, Beginner CNC Ideas, Profitable CNC Crafts, CNC Design Tips, Shapeoko 5 Pro Setup, DIY Address Signs, CNC Project Guide, Making Money With CNC, Shapeoko 5 Pro For Beginners, CNC Woodworking Tips, Custom Address Signs CNC, CNC Engraving Tutorial, Shapeoko Project Files, CNC Home Decor Projects., BLg&x%

Id: oHIdSZ7eM1c

Length: 25min 58sec (1558 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024