Shaper Origin (+ Workstation) Tips | How To Improve Your Workflow

welcome back everyone and thanks so much for tuning in today i know i'm a bit late but we've recently reached 100 subscriptions to this channel and i want to give a big thank you to everyone who supported us so far we hope we can continue bringing you the content that we have so far so if you haven't subscribed already please do so we have a few really exciting projects and videos in our pipeline that are coming soon today i'm going to be talking about a few tips and tricks concerning the shaper origin and the workstation i've had both for about three months now and i've developed some strategies to not break any more cutting bits and i have a few other tips that i'd like to share with you it doesn't matter if you've had your shaper origin for a few years now or if you just got yours or if you plan to buy one i'll try to keep it as general as possible and i do quite have a lot of tips so i'll try not to talk too much and keep it short so let's dive right in with the first one let's start out with this sign i made from acrylic glass you might have tried milling into acrylic glass before and notice that it clogs up your drill bit pretty quickly the engraving of course was done with the 60 degree v-cut bit that is shipped with a shaper origin but at some point i had to cut it out and i used a special cutter for that i'll put the link in the description where you can get that cutter in europe it is a single flute bit so not two flutes like the standard shaper origin cutters and that does a much better job at not clogging up and getting the chips out from the acrylic glass and i haven't tried this yet but they say it's also possible to work in alloy with it so maybe i'll try that soon i'm using it on metals but for acrylic glass so far it works pretty well and much better than the standard bits at some point i was trying to make pretty intricate cuts that were only about one millimeter wide unfortunately i have yet to find a one millimeter cutter that is high quality and doesn't cost too much but for now i just bought this cheap set off of amazon and i'll be putting the link in the description it's a set that ranges from about 0.8 millimeters up to uh two or three millimeters and you also need a uh 1 8 of an inch collet shaper sells this so that you can use these cutters with a shaper origin but they do work it's not the best edge but it's a one millimeter edge and for really sharp turns um they work so that's a tip you can use conventional bits for your shaper origin i have this set here of 12 cutters that are made for use with a conventional router this is a guiding bearing that works well with a conventional router but the shaper origin doesn't like that so we're going to remove this and then we can for example use this bit to just round over a corner allow me to demonstrate [Music] so [Music] in the case of this round over bit i'm just going to enter the width at the narrowest part of the cutter which is eight millimeter i've just done a z-touch and now i'm just gonna plunge uh three millimeters and look how the rounding uh turns out to be and after that where we can move the offset and the cutting depth to change how the rounding looks and get some really cool results by doing this we get just a really slight rounding of course i could have gone in a bit deeper but this was just to show you it's absolutely possible to get a nice effect without the use of any additional guiding fence or marking just with a conventional cutter and the shaper origin you can use a roughing cutter with your shaper origin what is a roughing cutter well it's a bit that's slightly more aggressive than your standard end mill its edges are kind of jagged and not smooth that means you can go much faster in harder materials and really take away a lot of that material in a short amount of time it won't give you such a clean edge as an end mill would the one supplied with shaper origin but it's a great way to really go quick through your material and just take a lot of it away and maybe mill with an offset and then take that away the last maybe 0.4 millimeters with an end mill and then you get a really quick but still very nice cut i'm gonna demonstrate it i don't have the hardest wood here right now but i think i can give a good impression how fast this bit is and how deep i can go in without overheating the bit [Music] i'm gonna take away eight millimeters and i'm gonna go considerably fast and also just with a spindle speed of three and um i guess you're gonna be able to see how much material i can take away at relative ease [Music] that's a pretty nice cut already although on the sides here you can kind of see and feel the ridges from the roughing cutter so i would go over this again to get a nice and smooth finish but the lower surface here is is great and like at that speed if you compare it to maybe the two or three millimeter passes especially in denser wood that i would be able to make with a normal end mill then this is just way faster check the temperature of your cutting bit and the spindle from time to time if you're unsure about your cutting parameters such as how deep you're cutting your spindle speed and how quickly you're moving shaper origin then just suspend cutting for a moment and feel how hot your bit and your spindle gets and if they're too hot then probably one of your parameters is too high and you should take it a bit slower that happens especially in dense materials it might make sense to check that before you ruin your bit because if you overheat it then it won't be sharp anymore and been there done that not a good idea before cutting you should think about where your parts are going to come out of your workspace that's important because of how the board you're cutting on is fixated to your table if you're using clamps then you want to avoid those clamps because otherwise shape of origin or maybe even just your hand or the hose of your vacuum will collide with the clamp and if you use double-sided tape then you want there to be tape where the part is going to come loose after cutting because otherwise it's just gonna run around freely and if you've ever done that on a traditional cnc machine then you know it gives bad results and might even damage your cutter and your machine so plan that ahead and then apply double-sided tape or clamp things down so that they won't move even if you've separated them completely from the rest of your workpiece think about the order you're going to do your cuts in now i don't mean you have to make a list and plan everything into detail but just think about in what order it makes sense to work if you have a pocketing cut and you have a large pocket that's maybe even larger than the base of your shape or origin and you just offset that pocket in height by like four millimeters and if then you realize you wanted to have a logo that's completely cut through your material in the middle of that pocket then that won't work because you can't place origin correctly it'll always rock around the edges you've already cut so you want to cut that logo in that particular case beforehand and then do the pocketing cut and if you just think about the order and what origin is capable of and how you want to keep it stable while cutting then you will do a lot easier in the long run another thing to consider is your tape placement the shaper origin needs enough tape to be able to orient itself on the work piece at all times and you can see if everything is fine with the tape meter on the display the second thing is you want to place your tape intelligently so you don't need a lot of it allow me to demonstrate on this work piece i cut some kitchen cutting boards out of this wooden plank and the first thing i did was i laid down long strips of tape on both sides and that was a good starting point the origin was able to to cut fine but of course the first cut i did for the cutting boards after some logos were finished was the outline and that first cut even if it was just one or two millimeters deep completely destroyed my entire track of tape and then i had to re-tape on the surfaces of the cutting boards and on the outsides here and i basically wasted like two meters of tape because i didn't think ahead if i had done that before cutting i would have applied the tape on the surfaces of the cutting boards or maybe between them but not directly where i was sure i would be cutting later on thinking about tape placement beforehand will not only save you tape but also time because you don't have to reapply and rescan new strips of tape a good method to do this is to use shaper origin's aircut feature so not turning the spindle on and not plunging but just moving the machine everywhere and checking if it can see the tape clearly in all positions that you're going to get into and also on the display you can see the outlines of your parts and can check if they run through tape and if they do it might be a good idea to either reposition your shaper tape or to change the position of the parts digitally before cutting to get them into a more advantageous position should i use the shaper workstation for this project or should i clamp my part down on the table [Music] so the workstation gives you a lot of possibilities to clamp your parts in weird angles and positions and there are way too many features to cover them all in this short tips and tricks video but the two very basic features that i would like to point out are the fact that the tape surface is already done here so you don't have to reapply any tape and the shelf gives you the option to adjust the height so no matter how thick your part is you can always get it level with your table and those are two features in my opinion that save you a lot of time versus clamping your part down on your table applying tape and maybe having to get the height right now of course for small parts it's a no-brainer i would use the workstation but for bigger parts that don't necessarily fit the supplied shelf space the decision might be a bit tricky what you can do here is you can extend the top board of the supplied workstation shelf so that it matches your project size in my case i've just double sided tape down this board of wood here but you could also clamp something on here or screw it down to go wider and also longer than the original shelf and that really gives you possibilities for example for parts that would otherwise be too long to mount them here or also in length you are only constrained by how long the shaper origin can see tape i'll put a link in the description to a very nice community project i found in the shaper forums of someone who measured how long you could go before that losing track of tape happens so sometimes it might make sense to actually use the workstation instead of doing it without the workstation because it just saves you time and you don't have to use tape the next tip i haven't been able to test yet but maybe it can give you some inspiration i had a project it was a rectangular part and it was a bit too large to use the support bar here but we needed to use the support bar or some kind of support here because otherwise origin would have rocked over an edge and of course i didn't want to mill into my support bar here we ended up doing it in a weird and time consuming way but for the next times i built this i call this the support bar spoil board because you can just drill into it it's just cheap wood and it's supposed to be mounted in the same way as the original support bar to give origin the support it needs over here but to also be spoilable and you can even use this edge then flip it around and flip it around again so you basically have four tries if you completely chew up this edge to use this i ran the spoil board through a jointer slash planer to get it to have the exact same thickness as the original support bar so it should theoretically be flush with the top but i haven't concretely tested that yet and maybe i'll have to send it down if it works i'll also put the plans to this and the exact dimensions on shaper hub so you can just either make your own with shape or origin or just quick and dirty cut it with a track saw another quick tip concerning the workstation i noticed after a few cuts with the workstation that the support bar here was not exactly level with the rest of the workstation there is a way to adjust this it's also covered in the owner's manual of the workstation but it wasn't very clear that that was possible so i'd like to point it out if you have that problem that the support bar isn't quite where you want it to be it has to do with these angle brackets and there's actually a kind of secret grub screw it's hidden down here in the corpus of the workstation you can adjust this grub screw to get your support bar back to being level with the rest of your workstation now keep in mind that these grub screws are usually factory calibrated so adjust them only if you know what you're doing and if you actually think you have a problem with the height of your support bar while cutting don't cut your last pass completely this is especially important if you realize while cutting that your part isn't clamped or double-sided taped down too well or if you have a very thin or intricate part what i mean in detail is while you're cutting your very last pass don't do it in one go because it might be that your part comes loose and you ruin your edge but cut it in segments so that you always have small slivers of material standing and that will additionally hold your part and keep it from kind of flipping away speaking of a nice surface finish use offsets to your advantage i'll make an example you want to cut a rectangular hole into a wooden board to put another part into don't cut exactly to the size you want later on on the first pass but do an offset and take maybe half a millimeter away from every edge do the whole thing a bit smaller until you only have maybe one or two millimeters of material standing and then on your last pass where you go all the way through take that offset away and go all the way to the measurement you actually want to have this will give you a much better edge quality because during the first few passes the shaper origin and the cutter bit have to work against a lot of surrounding material but on the last pass there's only very little of that left so if you do the actual edge that you're going to have later on on the last pass without that offset then there will be much less force on the machine and the origin will be able to guide that cutter exactly on the edge contrasting to uh if you're just plunging into a new material you have all the material around the cutter and um it's more prone to get jitter because i mean it's physics you have all that energy and the wood kind of deflects it if you do the offset method and only cut to the size you want on the last pass then the surface finish will be much better and you can also go quicker on the first few passes because the quality isn't that important on the first few passes it's only important on the last pass without the offset i have two tips for you concerning inkscape inkscape is a software in which you can create and modify scalable vector graphics that you need to be able to cut with shaper origin it's important to tell inkscape in which unit you want to be working in so for example millimeters or inches to do that you go to file document settings and here in the drop down menu you can choose millimeter inches so you can choose your unit here and then everything you draw or everything you work with in inkscape will have the correct unit the second tip i'd like to give you concerns rounding corners in inkscape that's a very common thing that i have to do quite often because the cutter of course can't do indefinitely sharp corners so you'll always have to kind of round over those corners to be able to translate them precisely into real world and in inkscape my method is the following the first thing you want to do is to clean up these edges because especially if you for example import other svgs or if you kind of digitize them from photos it might be that you have these weird points in the middle of straight lines and you don't need them so we want to get rid of those i'm going to go up here to edit settings and then just here in behavior there's a dialog box threshold for the simplification and just dial that down to the lowest possible value and after that you can choose your path and either go to path simplify or press ctrl l and that as you can see will get rid of these redundant points so you only have the true corners that you need the second thing is you are going to add a path effect to this path by going to the path effects tab over here on the right clicking on the plus and then choosing round corners as you can see here it's already doing something i have a few options here to choose a unit of course and to alternate between like rounding with uh parts of circles or doing it with bezier curves i'm gonna choose circles here uh dial in the diameter of my cutter yes i actually mean the diameter i think radius here is is wrong and it's actually the diameter but feel free to measure it yourself and tell me if i'm wrong here and yeah as you can see here now we have prepared our part for cutting with a three millimeter diameter bit if i enter six millimeters here then it would change like so and that enables us to cut even this kind of part with the sharp edges using the inkscape roundover method i hope you'll find it helpful and if you have any improvements then please write it in the comments i have three quick tips for small and also impermanent modifications that you can do around your shape or origin usually to take your spindle out you have to use this tool that is supplied with the shaper origin but you can also replace this and the screw that is holding the spindle in with a handle and there are models that are sold for example on ebay i'll put a link below and then you basically always have that handle on your shaper origin and can use it to quick release your spindle and it also has the advantage that you can see if the spindle is locked or not because with this screw it's kind of hard to see and if you forget to tighten it down then your spindle might move while cutting and that's not very good so that handle gives you a bit more comfort and it has that security feature to notify you if everything is all right if you've already made some cuts with your shaper origin then you might have noticed that it's kind of hard to see the cutter and where it's cutting because it's pretty dark down there and there's a lot of chips flying around and one way to possibly improve that is to add some lighting i've seen some cool posts in the shaper forums about people adding usb powered lamps to their shaper origin and you can power them directly off of the usb port or you just add a battery pack with velcro for example then you have a led light down there and that gives you better visual access about what your cutter is actually doing the last improvement tip is for people who are either lazy or creative or both what you can see here is i've added a transmitter for a wireless power socket to the end of the vacuum hose and the power socket is connected to the vacuum cleaner inlet so i can just enable the vacuum by pressing on the end of the hose some models of vacuum cleaners already have this feature integrated into their hose but if yours doesn't this is a cheap 10 to 20 bucks method of adding that feature anyway check out the shaper community forums there's a lot of bright minds that have many great tips also a lot of stuff that i learned about shaper origin that i didn't know when i was first using the machine and i can highly recommend to just take a few hours to skim the forum and check out all the great ideas and improvements that are possible and maybe you can contribute your ideas there as well my last tip for today is for you to check out the shaper hub which is kind of the project sharing platform i also really like to hang out there and scroll through the many different projects and sometimes i find a cool one to give someone as a gift or to make something that can expand my workspace that's it for today if you have any additional tips or if i forgot to mention anything then please write it into the comments and i'll try to incorporate it in the next video of this kind if you're planning to get a shaper origin or if you already have one i wish you a lot of fun and creativity in making your projects and i really hope the tips i gave you today can help you in not breaking as many cutters as i did at the beginning and getting your projects up to speed a bit quicker thanks again so much for your support in this channel if you haven't already then please do subscribe and we'll keep you posted with more videos coming soon about all of our projects and stuff i do with the shaper origin and more fun technology stuff i'll be seeing you soon bye you

Channel: BodgedButWorks

Views: 41,979

Keywords: bodgedbutworks, diy, project, woodworking, electronics, bodged but works, 3D Printing, Software, CAD, Programming, Mechanical, Engineering, shaper, shapertools, shaper origin, shaper workstation, CNC, Woodworking, Tips, Make, DIY

Id: ezncVNwzlKs

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021