Why are 3D CNC Router Carvings So Expensive?!!

hey everybody how's it going Ruben here yeah so a topic came up lately that about cnce projects specifically and I get a get the question from a lot of customers and I know a lot of my my friends in the CNC community do as well is why do 3d carvings cost so much and you know it's it's kind of funny and I understand I'll you know due to ignorance as far as how did the CNC process works is one would think a the machine just cuts out the item and there's really little to no human intervention so why does a five dollar piece of wood cost so much to have an image carved into it well to kind of answer some of those questions and more for my customers just so you can understand the the work and the processes involved I'm gonna run through a little project here I'm actually in the process of making some some Christmas items for for some sailors and the process I'm gonna go through is example here is a 12-inch Navy information warfare device it I turned these into magnets put magnets in the back so this was when I finished yesterday but just to give you an example 3d carving or what we actually refer to in the CNC community is actually 2.5 D because it's flat on one side and you're talking about relief up from their 2-dimensional carvings on CNCs are relatively inexpensive and easy to do but when you get into relief carvings such as this right here then it gets a lot more time-consuming and there's a few reasons why number one is the design phase of each particular item software has gotten really good over the years and really a lot more easy to use and it was in years past there is a lot of automated features and software nowadays but there's still a lot of work that goes into it so each one of these models which an actual model or vector or a shape component has to be designed so whether that's taking a 2-dimensional image and then creating relief a 3-dimensional image of that so what I have open here on my computer right now is a program I use to design some projects or to import previously devant to excuse me designed shape files and models to set up a CNC project now this has to be done every time because no piece of wood is exactly the same size so in this case in this project that you're gonna see in a little bit I'm gonna machine four different ones of these type of little knickknacks out of one piece of wood so I've already gone through the steps of setting it up on my computer right here as far as in my software setting up my in my two-dimensional view right here my sites other piece of wood the dimensions and the overall two-dimensional shapes of the models and I'm going to carve on my machine so on the right side over here what you're looking at is based off going through the processes of what these actual models look like is selecting different tools that I want to use for it to carve out those things so first thing that I always use is a roughing tool pass and what that means is out of that big piece of wood a very large diameter mill goes and clears out all that excess wood after that then we select individual tool pass and configure that based off the type of tool we want to use to get the level of detail you want so smaller equals more detail to get detail out of it and then it'll go back and carve out all those little areas and give that detail in the relief here so over here you can kind of see in my preview based off let's see I've got a roughing tool pass and then for finish tool pass to get the detail in all of those and then another one because in one of these devices has some very fine detail and some lettering so I had to add another tool path with a even smaller diameter bit to go back and those areas after that's all seven done then there's another toolpath to go back and profile all of these to cut them out of that piece of wood so on average even though that I have these models created whether I bought them through another provider or design know myself I still have to every time I set up on these projects whether it's cut in one or two or a bulk run up a bunch of them is coming in every time before I get ready to start a project set up different where I want it in the piece of wood I'm going to cut and then calculate all those tool paths based on that every single time so a typical set up in the morning I'll come in and I'll probably spend 30 or 45 minutes probably sitting here on the computer based on if I know I have a certain dimension piece of wood and then set up all the items I want to cut out of that that I want to carve and then go through verify all my tool pass and I get the level of detail in the actual previews that I want and then save everything on there I thumb drive my files over to my CNC machine outside and then set up the machine we're gonna jump into that here on a second I don't want to make this video too long this is really just gonna overview just to give an idea of what what goes on behind the scenes as far as getting a CNC project design set up ready to cut and then let's hear a product like this so let's get out there and get to it alright so we're out here at the CNC router what you didn't see off camera for probably about the past 30 minutes was starting up the machine and calibrating everything because every time it's turned on everything has to be calibrated so it knows its location it knows the height of the workpiece in this case we're using the piece of about nine nine tenths of an inch thick cherry that we're gonna carve all those warfare devices out of part of the setup process why it's so time-consuming is number one getting everything square on there so it knows a good reference point setting up your measurement zeroing everything calibration run it through checks all that stuff so typically I spend probably about thirty minutes getting a workpiece set up on there and everything ready to go so what we're gonna do is we're gonna jump into right now I have a half inch end mill in the machine and what its gonna do is it's gonna go over and measure the tools don't know how long it is it already knows the height of the workpiece and then it's going to start clearing out big sections of the waste material down to just about the area where the actual detailed carving is gonna be this saves a lot of time so we're gonna jump right into it I'll show you real quick it's gonna go over a measure the tool we're gonna get ready Rock I'm gonna hook up dust collection and then I'm gonna film the next steps in time-lapse and then put a little bit of description in there as we change tools later and get to the next steps so without further ado let's let's get going [Music] so what it's doing here actually is every time we do a tool change for a different stuff in the process that goes over it such as a switch measures that tool so I notice the length of it and the dimensions of that so it knows where to start height wise so we're ready to rock right here I'm going to hook up dust collection let's get to it you you alright sir our roughing tool path just finished cleared out most big areas here so we're gonna switch over to in this one I'm using eighth inch Bowl news mill which is an eighth inch diameter at the widest part of the bowl at the bottom so I'm gonna get this switched over real quick and we're gonna get in to start doing some of the detail part I am not fortunate enough to have an automatic tool changer on my machine so I have to do it manually but it is what it is you know make do with what you got alright similar before it's gonna go over a measure the tool and then we'll get back to cutting I think we're about 20 minutes in right now [Music] I'm actually taking off my desk collection for this part of the video so you can see better it doesn't make near as big of a mess as the last night so all right we're gonna get into cuttin [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right and we're back so we just finished the finishing pass on all four of those with the eighth inch ball nose mill so one of the pins specifically this one right here in the corner and I don't know if you saw in the time-lapse there's a fine detail lettering area on it so I had to make another tool path I'm going to swap out tools for a sixteenth inch one it's going to cover that area right there and go finish the detail on that and then we'll switch out again and we'll get to run in the profile pass to cut all these parts out and then we'll go from there so I'm gonna swap out this bit real quick and we're gonna get to it [Music] so right now as it's measuring this right now on the timer as far as the tool pascoe we're at about two hundred sixty-two minutes so just under four and a half hours right now probably about another ten fifteen minutes to finish this pass right here then we'll get to cutting everything out and then kind of explain some those steps after that point the finish passes are done the only thing that remains as far as the actual CNC part goes is we're gonna take a small an eighth inch in mill and we're gonna go around to all those parts to cut them out once they're actually cut out they're gonna be held in by these little tabs that are built into the tool fast that's so that they don't break free until I actually pulled a workpiece off there and then cut them out of there break those little tabs so I'm going to swap out this bit real quick and we're gonna get to it here's a little guy that we're gonna use right here [Music] all right here in a second I'm going to switch it back over to time-lapse as I'm profiling and cutting these out I'll give you a kind of time count once we're done because this part is incredibly loud and messy yes so I'm gonna have hearing protection on while I'm doing this stuff and using arrows to blow out the actual grooves so it doesn't get too built up and break a bit alright so we just got done with a profile Pass pieces are still in here because they had the tabs in there every probably about eight inches keep them in there well break those feet interview but while they're in here I like to take the opportunity every time you machine something every once while in some of the areas you might have little fuzzies whatnot so I use a little type of sanding off on a high-speed drill setting because they're stuck in here I can go to go to town on the face of these deeper all that stuff before I pop them out and that's sandy edges on the Bell Center so I'm going to do that real quick alright let's go ahead and get these pops out of there I know a lot of guys like to clamp their stuff down on some of the bigger projects I like to screw them down besides a replacement squirrel board isn't that bad I've hit clamps before with end mills and not the workpiece for gaming I've had screws within mills before too but usually usually when that happens it's a large end mill and it just goes right through so you can tell either my spoiled worms out a little bit or slightly different thickness be so somebody has pieces and you quite go all the way through but they're right there I can poke through with my fingers so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through I'm gonna pop all these out where the box and I have cut all those tabs pop those out and then we'll wrap this up all right so we got these pieces out of here popped out of the actual piece that there so you can see some of them didn't didn't quite left to leave probably a few thousandths of a inch material in there so I'll have to go through clean that up I do that with all these so all the edges there's gonna be some thick spots around the edges where those tabs were that we were built in to hold it in place so it didn't you know fly free after it cut cut loose so I go over on my have a 3/4 inch flexible belt sander and I profile all the edges of these now on the insides everywhere there's like deep pockets or holes and typically what I do is I use a dremel with a small carbide kind of burrow attachment and go through and clean up all those areas someone want to come out pretty easy to finish up just profile and smoothen out the edges getting everything nice and polished and you know all the fine details some take a little bit of cleaning up afterwards so it all depends on what it is so this is a relatively simple project here making these I've probably made a hundred of these so the toolpaths developing everything getting efficient cutting going on I've got that down for the most part but so you can kind of imagine with bigger projects it can start to become quite quite the beast trying to design set out all the tool paths get that a machine to do everything you want it to do and then even though it is doing all the work you still have to babysit in because there are not machines that can be left unattended for long periods of time I'm always within earshot of mine so I can hear it typically sound is one of the key indicator that sums wrong something's wrong whether your your tool past something messed up you broke a bit you ran into something their computers they glitch sometimes they crash they do all kinds of weird wonky things so not everything turns out perfectly this job went pretty smooth I've got maybe five or ten minutes of clean up on each one of these and then I'll probably prep them for spring I'm not going to do those right now for these four because it's not very cost-effective me for to do four at a time when spraying finishes and getting everything set up for that setup and breakdown I'm in a two-car garage here so you know if I had to dedicated spray booth shop like that then easy day so really the point of this was to give you an idea of some of the work and time that gets invested into making some of these projects so you can imagine 12-inch four of them today I think I spent on there was right at the five hour mark roughing the finishing passes and then profiling to cut them out then you figure out probably four these four here spend another 20 minutes maybe cleaning them up the edges sanding down the edges all the pockets all that stuff and then starting to clean them up enough and ready to spray finish for these what I like to do eventually I'm gonna start slotting the back so people can hang them but for the time being I make magnets out of these and I recess for pretty decent sized magnets onto the back of these and they actually work very well for you know safe finally cabinets refrigerators all this done make smaller ones too but you know you can't go wrong with the big ones so I hope you enjoyed the video remember this isn't by any means whatsoever all-inclusive there's so much more that I didn't show you because this this video could easily go on for hours explaining everything from the design process on up to get into project setup machining cleanup and just some of the tips and tricks and we'll save that for another time so hope you enjoyed catch you later you

Channel: RB Wood Creations

Views: 308,639

Keywords: CNC, Router, 3D Carving

Id: MYTF11sR8bc

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018