Tiling Toolpaths on CNC: Andrew Pitts~FurnitureMaker

today I'm going to show you how I use the toolpath tiling function of vector X aspire software so I can cut a large sign like this on a small CNC machine like I have the idea is is that you can divide up your work into sections called tiles and do all the cutting on that one section and when you're done move the stock and then cut the next section and those sections are called tiles in order for me to be able to use the tiling function this is really all about aligning and indexing your stock so that when you shift the stock one tiles distance it lines up in the correct place so I started out with the basic shape that the YMCA wanted for their signs and entered the text that they wanted in the font they wanted and that was easy part I'm using a piece of material that is 48 inches long and 14 and 3/4 inches high and this is going to be white oak that's about an inch and a 1.15 inches is what I'm shooting for in thickness a little over an inch so first thing I needed was hold down holes so that I could screw the work to the spoil board so it wouldn't go anywhere but more importantly I think is the index holes if you notice this little hole right here and here those are holes that I drill in the material and into the spoil board and they're located exactly 1/3 of the distance from end to end of the piece so you know if I start here at 0 the first hole is at 16 inches the second hole is at 32 inches and the idea is is that if I attach this material to you know to the spoil board I can then put dowels into these holes and when it's time to to shift to the next tile I can just shift the whole material so what I mean by tiling is I've divided the material into three sections and we'll call on those tiles and I'll machine one section completely and then I'll shift the material to the next section which is it called a tile and similarly with the third section and these index pin holes are what guarantee that I keep the material exactly where it should be on the spoil board so you notice that the material here is in the you know the XY direction is the long axis but on my machine I have to feed this material through the the y axis the the front and back of the shopbot desktop are open so that's where I'll feed the material through so the first thing I need to do is I need to rotate this material so I go up to my material tab here and just reverse the width and the height so I'll make my width fourteen point seven five and I'll make my height 48 notice my thickness I didn't have to change and there we go it's telling me I have to recalculate all the toolpath I know that now let me just go ahead and select these vectors which is everything and I using the key number nine I'll just go ahead and rotate that the way I'm going to want it and finally I'll just align that to material okay so that's actually what the material is going to look like when it's on the on the desktop so at this point I can work on toolpaths because everything is aligned nicely so go where to my toolpaths tab and the what I want to do here is recalculate all these tool paths which I've used previously that's why I'm doing a recalculation okay I'm not going to go through making all the tool paths for you because you've seen that in other videos but i recalculated from the last of the eight boards that i cut and there's a new tool path and i want to rename this from the the old name to the new and that way I don't get my pieces mixed up okay so I the last board I did was Powhatan this now is not a way and I've renamed these and now I can go ahead and see what this looks like okay so we're gonna go ahead and preview all the tool paths okay now you'll notice that that previewed the entire piece well that's not really what I want I've got to do this in tiles so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my tiling manager by clicking on this icon here says tile tool paths go to my tiling manager and click on tile tool pass feeding in the y-direction feeding through in the y-direction it knows that my my tiles are you know right now one single tile 48 inches but what I really want to do is I want to make the tile 16 inches three of them so I'm going to update that and so now I have three tiles indicated each 16 inches high and I'm going to overlap each tile by about a quarter inch meaning that the cutter will move up a quarter inch into the new material and that way if you know it takes away any in accuracy it might have been caused by any misalignment anything like that it doesn't cost me anything excuse me and at that point I can go ahead and reset my my preview here and take a look and see what each tile looks like so down here you see over here in the tile manager says active tile is tile one okay so we're going to tile look at all visible tool pads for tile one and that's what it's going to cut and let me see if I can get that fully in the screen for you because there we go okay so that's what it's gonna cut you notice the four hold down holes and the index pinhole okay so I'll cut all that and then when I'm all done and by the way that cutting means I'm going to I'm going to drill the holes for the hold down in index and then I'm going to drill or cut the clearance cut and I'll show you that here let's go ahead and reset this for a minute first thing I'm going to do is just drill the hole down holes in the index hole and then I'm going to go ahead and do the half inch bit for clearing this and I'll clear it out most of the material if you look at this there's actually some some depth to it okay it's gone down the depth of the cut let's get that line back up and then I'm going to go ahead and do the detail with a ball nose bit okay and I have to rename this now okay I've got to go and rename that to 0 to 5 which is the shank diameter of the of my bit and I'm going to call it the pocket with the zero to 5 ball nose all right so that's the bit I'm using there and then finally I do the cutout tool path again let's move that up and you can see it does all the operations on just that one tile alright so when I'm all done with that we go to tile number two okay and we go through the same procedure we drill the holes oh by the way I had to unscrew the material and then shift it down on my board by 16 inches okay and basically what I did was the index pin then ended up going into the hole that I had already drilled in the spoil board down here I didn't show you that part but I had already drilled index pin holes top and bottom and the spoil board so I have to do is shift this whole material down and get that index pin into the hole and the spoil board that's at the very front of the machine okay and then I drill all these new holes and then I go ahead and I do the clearance pocket and I do the excuse me the ball nose details and then the cut out okay now let's get get all that Center and then I'm going to go ahead and do this the third tile shift the material drill the holes do the clearance do the detail with the ball nose do the cutout and now you can see I've I'm gonna hide that you can see I've cut the entire piece now I've got tabs in here holding the work in to the waist areas all I got to do is unscrew this take it over to the bench cut through the tabs do some sanding and I'm ready to do some finishing so that's how tiling works it enables me to take a large piece of work and cut it on a relatively small machine tiling is all about indexing the piece aligning it as I mentioned when I was showing you the software on the computer so the first alignment piece I went ahead and screwed down a strip of wood to my squirrel board and then I ran my quarter inch cutting tool to make a very straight edge on that strip and that'll be my alignment strip for the x-direction now the piece of stock is large you can see that it's four feet long and extends back I've got a roller support back there to hold it and in the y-direction I line it up with my mark for the one-inch position on my spoil board this double check the length I'm exactly 48 inches which means that if I divide this into three 16 inch sections or tiles I can go ahead and cut all of this first 16 inch section and then move the stock out this way 16 inches cut the second tile do the same thing move it out another 16 inches and cut the third tile so the trick is to keep the alignment perfect so that the observer doesn't know you cut this in three different sections so as I said the first thing I'm going to do is align this with the 1 inch in the y-direction mark which pretty much centers the work in my 18 inch deep spoil board and then I'm going to take a couple of clamps and just temporarily clamp this against the spoil board okay so there I'm I'm clamped nice and tightly up against my strip of wood at this point I can run the tool path for drilling the screw holes and the index holes into the material now what I didn't tell you was before I put this material on here I used the same tool to drill the index holes into the spoil board so that can then take a quarter inch dowel and put it into that index hole right through my material into the spoil board and now I am locked in the y-direction when it comes time to shift the material 16 inches I take that index hole there shift the material and thence put put it down into that hole in the spoil board and I've shifted exactly 16 inches and that's the whole idea and there we are it still needs some work but we got the three panels the three tiles cut and allowed my little shop bot desktop to do a big job thanks for watching

Channel: Andrew Pitts ~ FurnitureMaker

Views: 18,571

Keywords: Andrew Pitts - FurnitureMaker, Andrew Pitts FurnitureMaker, Andrew Pitts Furniture Maker, Andrew Pitts, woodworking, woodwork, wood working ideas, wood workshop, woodworking tools, woodworking videos, woodworking shop, woodworking tips, woodworking projects, how to woodworking, CNC woodworking, sign making, vectric software, vectric aspire, shopbot, shopbot desktop, CNC, How-to (Website Category), Wood, white oak

Id: 7ugAiQuJ-zo

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2015