Start CNC Crafting With These Top 3 Projects For Shapeoko 5 Pro! | Brett's Laser Garage

hey what's up welcome back to the channel it's Brett with American revivalcrafts today what I'm going to be showing you is my top three beginner projects for the CNC make sure to check out the description below because I'm going to be offering all of these files for all of these projects for free for you to try it at home all right come on let's fire up the CNC so here's our first project this is a tool accessory tray for your CNC the reason that this is a really good beginner project is because it uses inexpensive or scrap material which could either be MDF that's what I'm going to use in this case as an example you can also use plywood or even a soft wood like Pine if you had a project panel or something like that left over it could also be used for this project any soft wood is going to mean good for a beginner because it's going to be really easy on your bits and if you have any crashes or make any mistakes it's going to be a lot less likely to break a bit so here in our example this included file is going to have a sample tray that I've designed for my Husky tool cart to fit in one of the drawers but this can be modified any way that you want but let's go ahead and start with our first thing it's this setup wheel here our job setup we're going to click on that and we're going to type in our stock size in my case I'm using a piece that's 19 inches by 22 inches and I've measured its thickness with calipers which is extremely important to do on every project and it's about 0.62 inches in thickness we're going to make sure that our zero height is measuring from the top and our tool path 0 is set to the bottom left corner the lower left our material we're going to do put soft wood the machines shape Poco 5 Pro and retract height I've changed to 0.2 inches usually this comes stock at 0.5 it's a good idea to keep it at 0.5 of an inch when you're first starting out that's going to tell the machine how far up to raise the bit as it's moving to its rapid positions throughout the workspace so the higher it is the less likely you're going to crash into something so we'll leave it at 0.5 as you get more experience you could lower this down to like point two and that's going to save you a little bit of Machining time because that rapid movement is going to take less time to accomplish but we'll just leave it at 5.5 right now okay so our job is set up you'll notice in this file I have a perimeter square and then all the other small areas for various parts now again like I said you could easily modify this if you want to change this to whatever Dimension you can not only in the job setup file but in this transform file I mean you can make this thing 24 by 24 if you want and you can move these around anywhere that you want it's totally up to you to do what you want with this file in my case this is a pretty good setup I have room for bits down here for the tease nuts small trays large tray calipers caliper batteries extra bits clamps squares different clamps up here and some other hold downs and cam clamps up here so let's go ahead and make the tool paths go up to the tool path tab here the tool paths that we're going to use on this project are really simple it's actually only one it's going to be pockets okay so we're going to take material out of these in between these lines here to create a pocket which is going to make a space for us to hold our items the only other tool path I guess we're going to use is a drilling tool path and that's going to make that's going to be to make these quarter inch holes right here so we're going to be doing a pocket tool bath for most of this and the drill tool path for just a small portion of it the first thing we're going to do is create our pocket toolpath so I'm going to highlight everything and I'm going to hold down shift and I am going to click on our quarter inch circles that we're going to be drilling everything else on this screen right now that I have highlighted is going to be pocketed so I am going to go to the tool paths tab I'm going to click on pocket use current selection and I'm going to change my bit to a quarter inch I'm going to the softwood selection in the tool Library and I'm going to use the 201 End Mill which is the End Mill that comes with the Shea Poco so if you have this unit you will have this bit and it is a very common bit the quarter inch End Mill is one of the most common you're going to use it's definitely good good idea to have a lot of those two or three on hand at all times up cut down cut so for the step over I'm just going to change this to 0.12 and depth per pass since I'm using MDF on my machine I know I can go an eighth of an inch 0.125 per pass with this quarter inch End Mill and I'm going to leave the speeds and feeds the same as they recommend here for stock these are really good safe feed rates and plunge rates that carbide 3D recommends in their tool Library you can experiment with these you can always increase them if you want the nice thing about using carbide motion is that you're able to increase the speed while the machine is running you can actually bump it up even 100 up to a hundred percent so you can increase it on the fly when the machine's running so if I'm at 75 feed rate right now I can bump it up to 150 just on the controller as I'm running the job if I want to so I'm going to leave that at 75 and I recommend if you're new to leave it at what carbide 3D recommends except for the step over and the depth per pass in this situation okay so here is our tool pass generated the next thing I need to change is the start depth and max depth so obviously the start depth is going to be the top of the stock and the max depth on depth on these I'm just going to go down 0.2 inches then I'm going to name these pocket tool path okay so it's generated the tool path it's given us an estimated time of 54 minutes right now next thing we are going to do is do our drilling tool path so I'm going to highlight our circles here and click on drill use current selection I'm also going to use the one quarter inch End Mill the 201 End Mill for this and I'm going to put these down to a depth of 0.25 inches and I'm going to change the name to bit holders now we have all the tool paths assigned for this particular job let's go ahead and simulate I just unclicked show tool paths that'll clean up some of the lines as you'll see on the simulation but there we have it you can jog around you can angle this carbide motion really gives a really nice simulation so there you have it so we're about 54 minutes for this job if you want to experiment you can get that time down a little bit if you feel comfortable because for example if we switch this to about 100 inches per minute and then on MDF with a quarter inch End Mill that is still still fairly conservative that's nothing crazy it's going to get us down to 42 minutes so let's let's stick with that okay I'm going to save our tool path and send this over the machine okay so for my clamps I'm going to be using just the tease nuts and clamps that come with the shape Oco and these are great because they're plastic so if you do crash into them like I have here it just cuts right through them no harm no foul so I'm just going to set these up in the hybrid table and go ahead and tighten them down for these ones here on the front of the table I like to put a little piece of scrap wood underneath it just so I'm able to tighten this down and then I'm going to put about three or so additional clamps on here so aside from making sure that you have flat and milled stock already to go before you put it on the CNC one thing you can do to make sure it's flat is after you clamp it down you could take a straight edge and just run it on the board and make sure it doesn't rock or that there's any low spots and this board was a little warped just because it's been laying around the shop for a while but once I clamp but once I clamped it down it's nice and flat now as you get a little bit more experience something that you can do is you know surface the entire piece on the CNC with a surfacing bit or prior to putting on the CNC you can make sure it's milled with with traditional woodworking tools like a jointer and planer so here you can see the bits that are measuring the tool [Music] massage so now we have the machine initialized and we have our material secured to the spoil board the next thing we need to do is to set our zero point for the machine so I have a probe that does that with this unit it's the Bit Zero by shape Oco or by carbide 3D but I'm not going to use it in this sits in this situation just in case you don't have one I'm going to show you how to do it manually it's still very easy so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my wireless controller here and I'm just going to jog the machine over to the X and Y zero point that I want to set happened so all I'm doing here is eyeballing the center of the bit with the bottom left corner of the material and once I have everything where I want it I'm going to lock that in on carbide motion by setting zero on the X and the Y I'm going to hold off on the Z we're going to take care of that right now so I like to jog the bit somewhere towards the center of the work area and I'm going to go ahead and just manually lower the z-axis down until I'm just touching the material and one thing you could do is put a piece of paper under here that's going to give you a little little bit of clearance and you're going to lower the bit just till the paper drags on the bit but in this circumstance it doesn't have to be that critical so I'm just gonna run this down I'm going to kind of spin the bit until it just starts trimming a little bit off and right there is where I'm going to set it okay now we have everything zeroed the machine knows where it is in the space we're going to go ahead and click on run and load our file and this will bring up a quick overview of what we're doing you can also see a preview top view front view and isometric View that all looks good click done and we can start the job [Music] okay so we got our file cut our tray is looking pretty good you can notice that because I'm using an up cut End Mill it is ejecting the chips upwards which is good it helps us cut fast and it creates a clean bottom but it makes the top a little bit fuzzy so we're gonna have to do is sand the top of this just real quick to get rid of those fuzzies but other than that we're almost done [Music] so here's our completed tool tray let's go ahead and get this in the drawer and load it up [Music] okay so there you have it our first beginner CNC project the tool accessory tray this is just an awesome first project for so many reasons it's cheap it's easy to build it's forgiving and most of all it's really useful because when you're first starting out you need a place to put all this stuff and maybe you won't have all this stuff when you first start out but you will have a lot of it and you're going to continue to grow so this is a project that's going to grow with you another thing I'll say about this is even when you're experienced with cnc's you will make mistakes on my file I kind of had them I didn't make these Pockets quite big enough for my cam clamps here or these clamps here either but even if you make a mistake on it it's still usable I'm still going to use this it's fine I'm gonna change it in the file so it'll be good for you if you decide to download this but it just goes to show that no matter how much experience you have it's okay to make mistakes and it's still really usable so don't be afraid to try this okay so for our next project I've got a three-quarter inch sheet of MDF back on the CNC this time I've spray painted it black and we are going to make an American flag and this is just a really awesome beginner CNC project because they look so cool you can sell them they go like hot cakes even though there's a ton of people making them there's a lot of different variations you can do with them so there's always something new and exciting that you can make or you can you can change to them to really make them cool so I highly recommend this as a second CNC project a lot of the same processes are going to be in place from our tool tray like our work holding and the way we set up our file and our machine zeroing but in this project we're going to add vcarve engraving to the lineup I'll show you how it's done so the tool paths we're going to be using for this project are avcarve tool path for the stars and for the words we're going to be using a contour to cut out the perimeter of the flag and also a a pocket tool path to pocket out the stripes alright so whenever we start a new project we want to always start with our job setup so for this project we're going to be using a piece of MDF which I painted black and it is 24 inches wide and 39 inches tall our thickness is at 0.67 inches again we're zeroing from the top and our tool path zero is going to be the lower left and all these settings are going to remain stock one thing I want to say about the stock size in this example I'm going to show you how to make this flag by cutting it out of a larger piece of stock I think that's easier sometimes when you're starting out because you're able to put clamps around the whole perimeter of the project to make sure it's all held down nicely you could use an exact size piece of material so like a 20 22 and a half by 12 inch piece for this flag but you wouldn't be able to use clamps around the perimeter in some of the air areas unless you set them perfectly because some of the tool paths are going to run into them so I like to have a larger piece of material just to start out I recommend that so that way you don't worry about anything crashing in any bits crashing in into any of your clamps or anything like that that'll make more sense later when I show you this actually running so you can see this is our large piece of MDF here and then this is our actual project so I'm going to highlight this whole piece and I'm going to move it just up a little bit again that way I have space on the left I have space on the right the bottom and on the top also to clamp this down and I don't need to worry about the End Mill hitting any of the clamps okay the first tool paths that we're going to assign are the stars and the words we can group those together because they are both going to be a v-carve tool path for our tool it was already selected we're going to use the number 301 90 degree V I like the way this looks for this stars and for writing and we're going to leave all these settings the same this is just the stock softwood parameters again these are very conservative you can definitely up these if you like but we're just going to stick with the conservative stock settings in this example the starting depth is going to be the top as always but whenever you're V carving you want the total depth to be the bottom of the stock in our case our material is 0.67 inches so I'm going to put 0.67 so now that we have our vcarve tool path set up let's go ahead and set up the pocket so now I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going to left click on all of these rectangles and I'm going to click on the pocket tool path use current selection my end mill again is going to be a 201 quarter inch End Mill that's already selected start depth is the top of the stock max depth on this is going to be 0.1 inches and I'm going to change this name to Stripes if you want to go back and edit your tool paths at any time all you need to do is go onto the left menu here and double click on whichever tool path you you want to change and I'm going to edit my quarter inch End Mill here to have a step over 0.12 inches and I'm going to change my depth depth per pass to a quarter inch again those are still pretty conservative settings when using MDF or a soft wood and that's going to take my time down significantly okay so now we've got a vcarve we've got our Stripes pocketed last thing we need to do is select the outside perimeter and we are going to do a contour cut that is going to cut all the way through all of this material quarter inch End Mill 0.125 depth per pass plunge and feed rate RPMs are going to stay the same but for the depth here I'm going to use the stock bottom which is 0.67 inches and I'm just going to change this to 0.675 I'm going to go a little bit lower than the stock just to make sure I cut through okay the next setting that's really important is your offset Direction this is going to tell the tool where to cut on this line right now it's set on to inside left of the line so this is actually going to make our Square here if we had it set like this our rectangle would be smaller than what I drew on the file by a quarter inch by the size of the End Mill and we don't want that so we're going to go ahead and switch this to the outside right and you'll see that changes the tool path from the inside to the outside now we're cutting this rectangle out exactly the same size that I had it drawn in the file you can also switch this to a no offset and that will cut right on the line and that's useful for some circumstances but in this case we want to go outside right and you'll see I have these squares with an x on them around the perimeter of the file and those are tabs those are areas that my Contour cut is not going to cut it's going to leave a small amount of material there so that this piece our main flag will not float in the middle of our stock when it cuts all the way through this will hold it in place when we cut all the way through and that's really important because if you do not secure your work piece and you cut all the way through it it's going to move and it's going to bounce around and it's going to get all messed up so if you're not securing this some other way with like double-sided tape or CA glue and blue tape you definitely want to use tabs and to start out I would highly recommend them over here on the the tab file you can actually set the parameters for what size you want the tabs I just leave that stock for the most part okay there we have it we have all of our tool paths assigned our V carving our stripe pockets and our perimeter cut out remember if you ever want to reorder these tool paths all you have to do is left click them and drag them and you can put these in any order that you want but in this case I do like having it in this setting I'm going to start with the 90 degree V bit to carve out the stars and the words and then I'm going to pocket out my stripes I don't want to put my perimeter cut out here next necessarily because if I did that I would have all these tabs supporting the work piece but ideally you want to have the most amount of support for your work piece when you're doing this much of a pocket operation so I'm going to go ahead and change my perimeter cutout to the very last thing that we do that way this Contour will not be cut and it'll be supported fully by the clamps and everything will be nice and sound we'll go ahead and look at the simulation and there we have it you can see those tabs what those look like in this simulation all right let's go ahead and send this to the machine so I'm going to use a 90 degree V bit for this tool path let's go ahead and get it loaded up in the spindle and get it started so here's a quick tip when you're engraving Stars it's really important that you have your zero height set perfectly and it's also really important that your material is flat if it's not your stars will come out to be different sizes when you actually engrave them over the union space so I've taken Extra Care to make sure I've double checked and triple checked my zero height here where the union is going to be specifically and I've also put my ruler on this portion of the MDF and made sure it was flat by applying a little extra clamping Force that's just a little trick that I've done to make sure that even though you might have some slightly warp material like Pine or MDF like in this case the MDF I'm using is scrap so it's been kind of leaning up against the wall for many months so it's a little bowed so those are some quick tricks that you can do to help flatten out your board to make sure your stars are nice and crisp let's see how it turns out [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] other tip I have is get yourself a sanding block here this is just a scrap piece of three-quarter material I've glued on a strip of 80 grit sandpaper on one side and 120 grit sandpaper on the other I'm going to use this to sand in between the stripes where I pocket it out and also some of the chamfered edges of the flag just to knock down any Burrs this is really really easy to use especially on MDF because it's sand so easily but if you make a lot of flags this is a nice little tool that I always keep right on the CNC because I use it all the time for lots of different stuff all right let's get this cleaned up and finished up [Music] foreign number three on my list of my top CNC projects for beginners is going to be a valet tray now a valet tray is simply a pocketed tray that you can put on your nightstand or by your front door to throw your keys and wallet into when you're not using them and so you always know where they are very popular these are all over the place but I think it's a great project again because it's simple it's useful Everyone likes them you can give these as gifts you can try to sell them you can do so much with them and they're so simple to make now we're also going to be building upon the skills we've learned with the past two videos by adding a new tool path to this project and it's not even really a new tool path it's just a different use for one so we're going to be using a contour tool path with a 90 degree V bit installed around the perimeter of our cutouts and that's going to give us a chamfered edge it's very convenient really makes it look finished so let's go see how we do it okay so first thing I'm going to start with is this large pocket here this is what your stuff is actually going to sit into on the tray so we're going to click we're going to select the vector go to pocket we're going to use our quarter inch End Mill we're going to edit the settings though we're going to do again step over 0.12 and our depth per pass is going to be again a eighth of an inch this is Poplar that I'm using so it is still a pretty soft wood this end Mill Will Blast right through it the other setting is going to leave the same just like the other projects feel free to change those if you want though okay our start depth is going to be zero our max depth on this is going to be 0.51 inches now the reason I did 0.51 inches is because I'm using a quarter inch End Mill that's going to be going down 1 8 of an inch per pass so if I were to do 0.5 inches this would take four passes for the tool to get to the final depth but I want go ahead and do a final fifth pass which is more of like a finishing pass and it's only going to cut off point zero one of an inch that's gonna that's the reason why I'm doing this at 0.51 inches it's just one little trick that you can do to help create this a little smoother you can also create a separate tool path for a finishing pass and change the step over to make it overlap as it cuts each time more and that'll help remove some of these Mill marks that you'll see when we actually cut this out but this is just a beginner way to do it and it gives a pretty clean cut let me just show you what happens if we go to edit and we change this step over to maybe let's say point or .075 you'll see what this does to the simulation here it's going to tighten up these lines so that means it's going to take longer because the bit is overlapping as it's going around in a circle a lot tighter but that's going to give you a smoother cut it's just going to take more time in this case I don't think it's necessary I'm going to change that back to 0.12 that's usually the step over that I or the depth excuse me the I'm going to change the step over to 0.12 that's a pretty good step over in my opinion for most operations especially basic operations so we'll leave it that way next thing we're going to do is we're going to engrave our initials so that's going to be a v carve so we'll select our Vector our tool is our again we're going to use a 90 degree V bit the only difference here is our start depth it's not going to be zero because we're pocketing out this information this we're pocketing out this section here so it's going to be lower so this start depth needs to be 0.51 inches that's the depth that we're making our pocket so start depth is going to be 0.51 and our max depth is just going to be the stock bottom and that's going to give us a nice V carve on here now I'm going to do our perimeter cut this is gonna be a contour I'm gonna use the quarter inch End Mill we'll change these parameters again to 0.12 depth per pass everything else is going to be the same we're going to change this only to 0.125 per pass an eighth of an inch per pass our start depth is zero our max depth is going to be seven excuse me point seven five five I just want to go just a hair lower now when you use this file you're going to have to change this to whatever stock size that you're using so make sure you get a set of digital calipers on it to measure what the thickness is and our offset direction is going to be again outside to the right okay now the new tool path we're going to use for this job is we're going to create a second Contour on our perimeter outline but we're going to use a 90 degree V bit and we'll leave all this stock and what this is going to do is create a chamfer on the outside of the cut and on the inside pocket so I only want to go to a max depth of 0.1 and I'm going to change this off to offset direction to no offset so it's going to cut right on this line now when I set this up I only selected this outside Vector what I want to do is also select this vector the inside line and the outside line I'm going to go ahead and click on both of these chains vectors to selected there we go so now I have both of them two vectors selected the outside and the inside no offset and I'm going to change this to chamfer okay so we're going to cut out our main pocket we're going to engrave our initials we're going to do a perimeter cut out with tabs and then we're going to chamfer the outside perimeter and the inside pocket line let's see what this looks like on the simulation looks pretty good you can see our inside and outside chamfers oh one thing I forgot you can see on our chamfers it is showing the tabs here so let's go back let's hide a simulation click back on our chamfer tool path we need to make sure we click this button here ignore tabs if you don't click this button it's going to raise the bit once it gets to these tabs and won't look right so we want the tabs for our perimeter cut out but we don't need them here for the chamfer so we're going to ignore those and I'll show you what that simulation how that changes here and there we have it our tabs have been ignored for the perimeter chamfer all right let's go get this on the machine I am using inch and a quarter Poplar for this you can use anything you want this file is set up to be used with stock as thin as three quarters of an inch all you have to do is to make sure when you're setting up the file you go to your job settings and you make sure you input your material thickness if you're going to be using carbide create like I have set up [Music] foreign we have the 90 degree V bit installed I'm going to leave the dust boot off on this tool path just so you can see how it's cutting and plus my vacuum is full right now anyway so it's not really doing much I had to bring in some reinforcements earlier during that perimeter cutout to take care of some of the Dust but but I'll empty that out later we'll change it up this is our last tool path of the day check it out [Music] yes [Music] foreign [Music] okay so there you have it there are my top three CNC projects for new users today we made a tool and accessory tray for all of our parts and pieces of our new CNC we also created a cool American flag with the Pledge of Allegiance and we made a simple valet tray to keep all of our stuff when we get home from work now if you're interested in working on some of these projects on your own I have the free files available for download on cutrocket.com you can find all that information in the description below but they are 100 free and of course as always if you like this video please give it a thumbs up it really helps out the channel and if you really like the content I please ask that you subscribe to the channel because we have a ton planned for the future a lot more videos coming out here very soon your subscription really means a lot to us and if you have any questions or comments make sure to please leave them down below we can continue the discussion and hey if you have any suggestions for videos that you'd like me to cover please leave them down below I'd love to hear from you or shoot me an email all right thanks a lot for watching see you on the next one

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

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Keywords: Start CNC Crafting With These Top 3 Projects For Shapeoko 5 Pro, Brett's Laser Garage, CNC Crafting, Shapeoko, Beginner CNC Router Projects, Shapeoko 5 Pro Tutorials, Easy CNC Projects, CNC Crafting For Beginners, Top 3 Shapeoko 5 Pro Projects, DIY CNC Router Ideas, Starting With CNC Routing, Top 3 CNC Project Files Free, Shapeoko 5 Pro Guide, CNC Router Tips For Newbies, First CNC Projects, Shapeoko 5 Pro Setup, CNC Router Project Ideas, Learn CNC Routing, BLg&x%

Id: bTmPElXFaVo

Length: 32min 48sec (1968 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023