V-Carve Inlays - Detailed How To

Today we are going to talk about inlays in V Carve and exactly how to do them and what all the settings mean. Check it out! First thing we're going to do is hop into V Carve and create a new file. I'm going to take a three inch by 3 inch. We've got our origin at the center, so we'll hit OK there that all looks good. Next thing, we're going to grab our artwork whether you created this in Illustrator or Inkscape you want to bring in your vectors. You can also create them in autocad and some other programs. Whatever floats your boat the best. I'm going to say move. I want to move this graphic to the center here of my workspace. And then if you hold the shift and drag in it's going to bring everything in equally from all sides. So this all looks good. When I look at the letters they have some dimension to them but when I look at this line and this line they need some dimension or they won't come out as an inlay. So we're going to use the offset and we're going to offset to the outside for that one 1/16 of an inch. And then for this one here we're going to offset to the inside a sixteenth of an inch. And now I'll have something to inlay there. This is all the major work we have to do for our graphic. Very very simple. When I look at inlays there are two pieces. There is a plug that is an embossed version of whatever it is you're doing. And then there's a pocket which is a V Carved version. The plug fits into the pocket from above so when we look at our plug, the plug has to be mirror imaged. So we need two different files to make this happen. I'm going to say file save as and I'm going to call this GG for Greg's Garage logo and I'm going to call this the pocket and then I'm going to say file save as and I'm going to call this the plug. Okay so we're going to concentrate right now on the plug and when we do that we think of it as an emboss it has to be mirror image. So I'm selecting everything. I'm going to select the mirror tool and say flip horizontal. That's going to reverse our graphic for us. The next thing we need to do is create an outline so that it embosses this graphic rather than V Carves it in. So I'm just putting a rectangle around the entire thing and that should do the trick. If you don't have this open already it's under tool paths and then show tool path tab and we're going to select V Carve up here. start depth I'm going to try and explain this as good as I can. What start depth means is how much surface do you want below the surface of the piece of wood that you're inlaying to be your glue surface. So you can't have zero because otherwise your graphics will basically line up and butt together and there will be no inlay. YUou have to sink your plug down below the surface of the pocket. This tells you how much. So if I say 0.1.. That's what I like to use, so 1/10 of an inch. It's going to give me a tenth of an inch glue surface before I get to this the level of where the graphic is going to match exactly. Hopefully that makes sense. Then I'm looking at the flat depth and I want that to be 0.1 also. Not because it needs to match but what it is. If I look at the .1 on this plug that's going to be halfway on this piece. I want a little bit of space before I get to this flat area so that my bandsaw can run in there and have a groove to run in. You could make this .3 you could make it .5, it does not matter as long as you have enough room for your bandsaw blade. I have found that a tenth of an inch works really well for me. My bandsaw blade fits in there just fine so I use .1 both for my start depth which is my glue surface area and I use .1 for my flat area and it gives me a tenth of an inch above where they get glued together to run my bandsaw blade. For the tool that clears out this embossed plug I like to use the 60-degree v-bit. You can use a 90-degree, you can use down to a 6.2 degree if that's what you want to do. The steeper that angle gets the more detail you'll have. I'll tell you, at sixty degrees it has plenty of detail for me. The next thing down the list is clear the flat areas clearance tool. So you'll notice on our plug we have a lot of spots that are just flat here and you can use the V bit you can just load up the V bit and make it go back and forth. But since it comes to a point, it takes a very long time to clear out flat areas. When I use an 1/8 end mill, it clears them much faster. So it's just a speed thing. You don't have to do it but for me I like to do it. So I'm loading up by eighth inch end mill here. Before we hit calculate, we're going to give it a name. I like to say GG logo well maybe capitalize LOGO and then I like to say plug so that I know that this is the embossed piece. I'm going to hit calculate and we see exactly what those tool paths are going to look like. If I turn off the pocket we will see just the V Carve. if I turn off the V Carve we will see just the flat areas that are going to be cleared with the end mill. That is going to be my V bit. So save.. I like these to go in order so that I know a year from now how I want them. So this is going to be the first tool path I run its GG logo plug. I'm going to say V bit 60 degrees that way I know the tool I know the order and you know, a year from now I can come back and make this same thing. So I just selected my pocket, I'm going to hit the save tool path and I'm going to say 02 because I want that to be the 02 and I'm going to say 1 - 8 end mill so that I know that it's an 1/8" end mill. Now we're going to turn our attention to the pocket so we'll hit save on that and then file open. And we will go to the pocket maybe there we go we'll go to the pocket and open it up. This is a much simpler version. Here we select all of our graphics again we click the V Carve. Since we didn't draw the rectangle around it it's not going to emboss it it's just going to V Carve. In here we want our start depth to be zero we want the surface of where we're going to have this V Carve to be the same surface as the graphic. If you actually want to sand off a little bit if you want to leave a little bit for sanding you can take the start depth and add it in there. So let's say we let's just say for fun we want ten thousandths of an inch for sanding we can set that start depth to ten thousandths and it will allow us to run it through our sander. So let's do that for our flat depth. We actually want a larger flat depth here and why I say that is you need a place for the glue to sit so this is the surface of my graphic this is my start depth of zero or if you know a ten thousandth of an inch. I'm going to have point one inches of my plug and then I need a spot under that for glue to sit. Because you don't you can't get all the glue to squeeze out and if it doesn't have extra depth you won't have anywhere for it to sit. So if you leave an extra tenth of an inch there it works out really well to create a little dish for the extra glue. So I'm going to say .2 inches on my flat depth. Same thing we're going to use a flat area clearance tool it'll be the 1/8" end mill and I'm going to put here. GG logo and this will be the pocket. Calculate, okay. So sometimes you get a graphic that doesn't need the flat area clearance to land. This happens to be one of them so on the V Carves on the pockets a lot of times you don't have those flat areas unless you have a really wide graphics. Why don't we take a look at the preview of this. We'll just hit the Go button on that and then we can actually tilt this up when it gets done and take a look. And there's our object V Carved in and everything looks awesome. So we're going to save that tool path. I'm going to close this, we're going to click it save tool path and this is going to be GG logo pocket this will be 01 and this will be a V bit 60 degrees. So there we go. Now it's time to cut our two pieces and then we'll glue them together saw them apart and then sand down to our inlay and we'll be done That is it for the V Carve inlay video. I hope if you have a project like this and you want to enhance it; that this video has helped you out. I want to wish everybody good luck on the projects they're working on. Until next time, take care. Feel free to click or tap on the images to check out some of my past vids. If you like my videos click on the Greg's Garage logo and all my future videos will show up in your YouTube feed.

Channel: Greg's Garage

Views: 148,564

Keywords: #gregsgaragekc, #DIY, #Maker, vcarve, vectric, how to, tutorial, inlay, emboss, engrave, cnc, digital wood carver

Id: WMD3SrP7Vxk

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2017