Tips & Tricks | VCarve Inlays | Vectric

in this video I'm going to share with you my exploration of creating V cough inlays now I've never created a V curve in there before so I'm doing this from a complete beginners point of view and sharing this with you in this video so what is a B curve in name sewn inlay is basically where you cut artwork into two different materials a male and a female part that you bring together to create a flush contrast in design just like the examples that you can see here and a V curve in they uses a V curve tool path to create the in neighbor by we're creating a beveled in they so do not get this confused with the auto inlay feature that we have in the software we're doing this as a technique that's using the V carve tool path now inlays rest in their respective pockets by contact along the size of the innate and the pocket okay so this would be the male part that slots into the female in there where they make contact and that's how the two joined together and using a V bit tool rather than a flat tool just ensures that we are not limited to the radius of the tool so that way we create the beveled edges and also we are able to create in layers with very sharp points and corners just like some of the examples that you can see here now this technique was created by customers Paul sank and Damien Durant way back in 2006 and they shared this technique on the vectric forum so if you go to your internet browser go to the vetrix forum and in the search bar here type in a simple way to make in this and you will find the original thread created by Paul sank all about how to create the V carved in lace using the V curve tool path okay so the thread explains everything how to create in there's the concepts what's actually going on when we're creating in layers and here many other users have shared their examples of they're in lace and you can see it's 24 pages strong right up until very recently you can see that the the thread is still current and people are still referring to this for their own knowledge of creating be carved in lace and this is pretty much what I went by now you go to page one what they did do was Paul actually created a document okay the V curve in May description and procedure dot PDF which so I think has been updated further on in the threads but it basically gives you a walk through of how to create them and this is what I used as my start point to create my inlays so how do we create an in name so first off you're going to need artwork or vectors or you're going to create your vectors from the artwork that you import into the software now your first set of vectors so here I've simply trace around the compass rose and this is going to act as my female pot so this represents the female pocket that I'm going to carve into inside of these vectors now you need to create a male counterpart and so the idea here is you take the female vectors and you basically mirror them to create the male part and then there you have a male set of vectors the idea is you cut the female and the male parts with a V carve top path using the exact same tools so here is the female part here is our male counterpart the idea is you Kalu the two parts together and then you basically skim the material flush to reveal that in a and it really is that easy so let's take a closer look at the female in DES so you can start with vectors for the female and you're going to machine everything inside of those vectors using the V curve tool path where we specify a flat depth of whatever is you want to enter in here and so the idea is we're basically cutting into the vectors whereby we're creating a beveled pocket okay right then easy so now we go on to the male in name so for the male part we need vectors for the male so those vectors are the same as the female except they've been mirrored over you need to create another vector say a square that goes around the outside of the part to specify a boundary that you want to cut away because for the male we're machining everything outside of the vectors this time to create a raised plug part so everything that is purple here is what will be machined away using the V craft or path now it's important that you use the exact same tools that you used to cut the female inlay for the male inmate otherwise this is not going to work now in terms of our cut depths the difference with the male here is that we also apply a star tip and a flat depth and the total combined value here must be equal to the flat depth that we specified for the female part and so why are we creating a start depth and a flat depth here well the reason why we include a start depth as that allows us to drop the tool down to cut more of a bevel so it can fit snug within the female and so this start depth base represents a male insertion how much of the male part is going to go in to our female pocket where the two are glued together and basically mate at the pinch points or the areas of contact as that goes into the female part and so to summarize the innate pockets our female part is going to be cut inside of the vectors like you can see here where we specify a flats depth and we specify our tools that we're going to use to cut the female parts and that will create this beveled in a pocket and that's what it would look like if it was to cut that out the male side the curtain depths a combined total of the cut depths must be equal to that of the flat depth of the female part we must use the exact same tools that we use for the female part in order for this to work and so drop in the start depth down just means that we basically cut more of the bevel in order for it to fit inside of the female pocket now you must be mindful of your start debts ensuring that they're safe and appropriate for the tools that you are using because the tool will plunge in at the start depth and continue to cut into the flat depth according to your past depth okay so the first pass will be at the start depth plus the tools past depth or the flat depth if that is less and if this doesn't make sense you don't need to worry about that this process works so just follow the steps in this video now in terms of your V bit tool one important thing to think of is that you want to make sure that's the length of the V bit tool is longer than the depth that you intend to cut down to we also want to make sure you measure the angle of the B bit tool sometimes the tools can tell you it's a specific angle when in fact it actually isn't so try and be very accurate in terms of your measurements and then what you input into your tool selection so in terms of machining first off we're going to cut the female and the male parts with a V curve tool path using the exact same tools but we're cutting in two different materials per male / female once you've machines those you're then going to glue the two parts together clamp them sure to leave overnight to dry and then tomorrow you can go ahead and skim your material flush and that's pretty much it and this is the satisfying moment that you will reveal the inlay that you've been working on and it really is pretty easy so now that I had an idea of how in maze work with that successful compass raised I decided how I could take this stage further and I thought about creating inlays within in nays and so what I did as I scoured the internet for something that I think would be quite nice to create an inlay from and I thought about doing the Tudor Rose so here we have green leaves in the background we have a red rose a white rose and a yellow Center part of our rose so this image I managed to get an SVG file and this is basically a vector image and these are the vectors that I used and I trimmed some of them up and you can access all of the files from your project folder so all the files that you get access to are all here okay so you've got the all of the different inlays ordered by one to six and we'll talk more about as we progress through this presentation okay so how we're going to create the in nays so the first in they will create is the leaves okay we're going to cut the leaves like so once I've done that were then going to cut into our first inlay where we have the mated female and male of the leaves and we'll cut into that to create our second in May which is the red rose now for the white rose I'm going to leave that as our initial first inlay material so we're just going to leave that there and that'll be enough to create the contrast between the two different inlays we have so far and then the third in there will be the center part of our Rose bright then so let's have a look at how the build went so first off I gathered contrasting material to use for the four different elements of our design and with that I began to create the first in May so first off we're looking at the leaves here okay so this is the female part and that's what we're cutting now from the research that I've done I've read that it's more appropriate to glue the male and the female part together and clamp them together that way you have even pressure underneath and on top and so that would require me to take the female parts of the inlay off of my machine in order to do that so what I had to think about right from the get-go was how am I going to basically re-register my part when I cut further in further in layers into my initial first female part so what I did was I drew up some dowels and dowel circles in the software and basically apply a profile toolpath cutting inside where I went all the way through the material and a little bit into my spoil board kind of marked on the spoil board where those dowel holes were and also made a note of my x0y0 positions from my CNC machines home start position and so these values became important to me throughout the process of creating these in this it was always able to refer back to this point where I could locate my material and everything will be lined correctly in terms of the X and the y values and so using the same tour path setup that I used for the compass rose I was able to machine the female part like so along with the male inlay which is this part here now I read on the forum and experienced it myself and that was fuzzies on both of the male and the female cuts so you really want to clean up those before you glue the two parts together so here I just used a wire brush to clean it up until I had quite a clean project to work with where I was ready to glue the two parts together inside glued both the female and the male you'll say see that I actually made a note of my X 0 y 0 so I know it was this bottom lower left-hand corner so that when I come to align everything back it was from this point here guys are glued both the female and the male okay put the top on the male into the female try and really make the pressure even around the entire part because otherwise you could look at applying more pressure one side and you're gonna have a funny looking in neg because it wasn't pushed in at the kind of even precious that you need it too okay so you can see that part there and then you'll leave that to dry overnight and then you simply cut away or skim away the excess material now from my findings reading all sorts of comments on that thread on the four room quite a lot of people actually put this through a bandsaw and so that's how you take the male part away from the female now I don't have access to a bandsaw in our workshop I only have access to a CNC so I'm basically skimming my material off using a pocket tool path on top of our original female inlay so you do what's best for you if you've got access to machines that make this process easier then do that I'm just showing you what I've done in my own experience and so with that skimmed away created the first successful in may as part of this Tudor Rose okay so you can see how that looks there okay so with that we lined up the original female inlay with the registration pins and then it was time to cut the second female in day okay so this is the red rose and it's also the center part of the Rose itself okay so this is what the first tool path looked like using the end mill to create the pocket part of the in a and and this was really scary stuff watching this because you're watching the Machine cut away and something that looks so beautiful earlier and something that in terms of the glue time that you have to wait the 24 hours just be cut away like there and this is actually where my troubles began and so when I introduced the V cough tool path to cut the rest of that inlay this is what happened and so you can see that one of those leaves broke free so let's take a closer look at what is actually happening with the in line out we can actually see into it so having a look here so the start depth for our first male in there is actually too small for this design and for multiple inlays so we had a start depth of point once that means point one of our male part is coming in to our female counterpart of the design and then we have a flat depth of point two so there's a point two space underneath which we would leave a glue but we can clearly see here we have a void there and so there's two things here one is that we have quite a large flat depth here which is empty space and to the design is actually quite fragile without the material underneath and so we have to kind of be conscious of what's going on underneath as to where there's going to be contact for the male part when we're recreating into it to create the next in name and say really I guess in this circumstance we needn't have such a big glue gap so then I decided to change the start depth than the flat tip okay now I made some drastic changes here so I want to start depth 0.28 and a flat depth of a very small 0.02 the idea of this is that it would give me more male insertion the much smaller glue gap and hopefully this would provide more stability cutting into delicate areas of my design and so I must be mindful of my start and flat depth in terms of how much of my tall is going to plunge straight down into the material and I feel that with the tool that I'm using I'm confident that this is going to be okay but you must ensure that you are using settings that are safe and appropriate for your examples and so I've dropped the diagram in the software that you can access called inlay vector and so the idea here is I just want to show you a comparison of what I did previously to what I'm about to do okay say when the create in the male part at all is coming down at start depth of 0.1 here and so where the tool drops down to it's going to create a bevel that would look like this now increase in that start depth and then decrease in the flat depth to accommodate for the total flat depth here our v-bit tool comes much closer in and therefore we're going to cut more of it away so if we take a look at how that would look so again in comparison start at the point 1 flat depth of point 2 but the start depth 0.28 and a flat depth of 0.02 we're cutting much more of it away so much more of this will ultimately fit in to our female counterpart that you can see here okay so this is the contact point at the start depth of 0.1 and then this is the contact point at the start depth of 0.28 so starting again okay so I've got my female part made note of my x0 y0 in the lower left-hand corner over here and again I made sure that I wrote down the positions of my machine for my x0 y0 so I could use that to constantly align my female part when I come to create the further female cuts okay so the first cut for the female look like this and then here is the male part glued the two together clamped them up and that's what it looked like on top so that's the comparison okay so my first example is they have a much higher gap only 0.1 of that mail is going in to a material whereas this time we have 0.28 of our mail going into the FEMA and you can see it's much tighter here so leaving that to dry overnight the next day I come to skim the material the left is something like this you can see I have actually gone into it a little bit too deep but that's not too much to worry about just yet okay so it's successful in they there and now we're ready to cut the second female part so again looking at the red rose and then we have a successful V carve of the female in there for the red rose that you can see here and so just compare what we had before so this is with the start depth of 0.1 you can see we can actually see through that there and here we have much more of an insertion so this is making this much more structurally sound for this particular design that I'm cutting into and so with that a success I go on to create the male part for the red rose the male part for the center part of our rose and then we're ready to glue up the male red rose into the female pocket like so clamp it up leave it to dry overnight and then skim back the next day okay so there is the rose and you can see that as a little bit too excited about the glue up here and quite a lot of it has seeped out so I've just sanded that back and this is what we are left with okay so now all I need to do is input the plug for the center part so that's that in there and I've skimmed it away I just need to skim it a little bit more to get rid of that glue a seepage and there I am left with my final inlay and then I basically ran a profile pass around the outside of a circle to cut the part out and that is my experience of creating inlays and these are really effective looking pieces of art that can be done ever so quickly in the software and can be cooked very quickly on your machine the only time consuming part is the 24 hour wait for the glue to dry but they make some really effective looking pieces of art so what have I learned so everything that I have learnt has all been down to my own research from other user accounts and their experiences of creating their own inlays so if you want to create an inlay just simply follow the steps that have walked you through in this video and you are sure to have success with creating your first inlay now the things to be mindful of is that you'll need to modify your start depth for the male inlay or dependent on your design you saw in my example that for the compass rose the values that I used here worked perfectly but then they appeared to be a problem for me when cutting into the Tudor Rose and that could be also to do with the actual design itself but the idea was that I wanted to create more male insertion just to give that more of a structurally sound environment for me to recur into and there is a wealth of information over on the forum for you to read other users experiences and to ask questions

Channel: Vectric Ltd

Views: 30,999

Keywords: vectric, cnc

Id: l_QoZpI4als

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2019