XCarve Fusion 360 - First Project Tutorial

okay so we had to request on the Inventables forum from dev from Evans and alright this might seem like a stupid question but someone help me make my first 3d carving from an image now this is not a stupid question this is actually a great one this is where everybody starts and this is what everybody wants to do so I'll walk you through it quick down and dirty on how to create a your first carve alright and so I'm gonna roll with this now this is my third time trying to do this because first time I screwed up and recorded without sound next one I didn't even record it I went through the entire process thinking that recording was started so you can see that my little red light is blinking so I'm good so if you look here at your image the image is pretty clean it's good it's exactly what you want right clean edges so let's go ahead and start with this now we're gonna use fusion 360 and the universal g-code Center it's it's free it's cheap it's easy and now if you hadn't liked aspire or something you could probably just import this and set it up but we're just gonna go with what you got so we're gonna go ahead we're going to take your image we're gonna save your picture as and we're gonna call it Devon jpg Evan really sure alright got this I don't ever see okay heaven save it alright so now we have your picture now if you didn't have this setup right if it didn't look right or he needed the edges cleaned up but you want to do something more detailed go ahead and I'm gonna plug this guy here you go to fiverr.com look up this guy here his name is vibrations alright that's his URL fiverr.com slash vibrations he will take your graphic and for five bucks converted to a high-res jpg which is what you want it to be for the next step but he will convert it over for you for five bucks and he'll take a sketch if you like sketch it up he'll go ahead and you'll put really nice lines on it do the shading that you wanted you'll convert it over for five bucks best thing you could do alright once you have that you're going to go to this website called vectorization vectorization org alright so go here to the home we're gonna browse we're going to select our jpg file we'll hit open now we're gonna do the output format as SVG will it start and it's gonna go ahead and create an SVG file which is basically the graphic and you can't see it here but it's this is the boundary right the boundary starts here here here and here so that's a square we're gonna go ahead right click this Save Link As it'll dump this in our folder now we're going to come over here to our fusion 360 just like this over to inch right okay all right so when we start this out we always select the front now you may be thinking oh you know we got to start at the top now we start at the front so here's the front and we're gonna go and import this and we're gonna we're going to cut this out to be five inches by five inches all right so here's our five inch mark five inch mark this is the area that we're gonna bring it into so we'll go here to insert SVG we're gonna select our bottom plane welcome over here we'll select our SVG now when it imports its going to import it and it's gonna be huge literally like crazy huge 300 inches right we don't want that we want to bring that down to human level and you'll see these two little arrows here here you can drag and adjust the size if you go too far up here it'll restart so let's go here alright so we're gonna go right about five inches will kind of go here leave a little bit of room as we need to all right so we have a five inch board that we're gonna cut this into you can adjust whatever you want you may want to brink make it ten inches whatever doesn't matter an SVG is scalable vector graphics so you can make it two inches or you can make it 200 inches does not matter but for this we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna do right about five inches so we'll hit okay and now it brings in your graphic and it's already drawn up and everything so you don't have to worry about it alright now we're gonna cut this into a five inch board all right now you you're gonna go ahead and select it right click press pull and we're just gonna make this 0.5 inches now you can just stop here if you wanted to right and now you have your five inch piece simple but that's not what we're doing come back here we'll turn on the sketch this has got to come out because we're just gonna carve the the rest of the detail into it that'll be 5 inches now this we only want to do we want to carve in a tenth of an inch so I'm going to come here I'm gonna select these pieces now I hold down control when I do that right click repeat repeat press pull in this case we're gonna go point four inches which is gonna bring it up to a tenth this will be a joint now you can do a join it cut intersect whatever we're doing join so it's all one piece but when we look at it from the side you'll see here that it's got the engraving on here right so it's kind of pumped in alright so there's our image first thing we want to do is we are gonna go to file save and we'll go ahead and dump this into the first project right and we're gonna call this evans gamertag then we'll hit save alright so we have the image now we got to set up the the cam for it we're gonna go to cam just like that to be inches again alright so let's do our first setup so we'll do a new setup now see this right here this is your starting point this is your zero zero mark for your whatever you're building okay it's center of your stock so let's go here to stock we're gonna do a fixed box size okay so we have a five inch piece of wood that is five and a half inches tall see how it created that it's half inch thick and we're gonna round up to the nearest five or half every time alright so now the yellow part here is your board so if we look at it from the side here's the board alright so we have this now we're gonna do our cuts before we do anything else we know that we're going to use two different bits on this right because you can't cut with an engraving bit that you're using up here so we're gonna go ahead and we are going to copy come up here to operations willette paste this we're gonna call step 1 this will call step 2 well go ahead and select step 1 new operation 2d milling and we're gonna do a 2d pocket cut we'll come up here to select now you've probably set up all your tools or you didn't know you needed to we'll go here to sample inches now I'm gonna use a 1/16 right because it's a relatively small bit I picked it up at Ace Hardware for I don't know 8 bucks just a 1/16 bed and yeah so I have 0.25 inch cutting area and then the rest is tool will select this at 2200 rpm which is what our thing is coolant is disabled okay we're not using coolant on this I know you're gonna want to say well you know we're using air coolant you don't have an air coolant down there okay unless you have something set up but I don't think the x-carve is set up to understand any of these so just leave it disabled for geometry we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna go ahead and select the pieces that we want to carve out now you can do each one of these separately if you wanted to but you don't need to because we're doing it all one tool Heights retract height I almost put that 2.2 inches because there's no real other clearance right what's gonna happen is it's gonna create it's gonna finish a cut then it's going to come up then it's going to move over to the next starting point go down do the carve so this just is more of a time-saver but it's it's what you want to do ok well come over here to passes now stock to leave means we're gonna leave this much now if you're going in there with two different tools and you're going to go ahead and do what's called rest machining you would overhear in geometry you would say we're gonna do rest machining we're gonna leave you know this much space here and we're gonna come in with a smaller and even smaller bit and clean it up we don't have to for those we would do that so we're not gonna mess with rest we are not going to do any stock to leave we don't need to do multiple depths now if you're cutting this out of Plexiglas or you're cutting it out of aluminum do multiple depths and you know this means okay we're gonna do the first cut then we're gonna go down and then we'll do the next layer of cuts go down again the next layer of cuts we're not doing that because it's wood and you can you can you can do it with this the next part is ramping alright for this we're just gonna do plunge because we can just plunge right into the stock and start our cuts we're only going down a tenth of an inch and we're going into wood with a metal bit so we're fine there allow rapid retract is fine keep tooled down which means don't lift up between cuts keep it down as much as possible when you're doing engraving you want to turn that off like if you're gonna like if this was if there was a place here we needed to come back up you would go ahead and turn that off you can play with it later and figure it out so go ahead and we'll hit okay and then what it's going to do is it's going to generate your tool path so this is your cutting path if you want to see what that actually is gonna look like we can go simulate and we'll go stock turn the stock on we'll turn off the tool path I'll speed this up a little bit and we'll hit start then you'll see the little bit up here run through and it's going to go ahead and trace through everything now as it's doing that you'll see how it lifts up comes over turn on to a path see that yellow mark that means that it's going to lift up here over - okay so you lift it up and it'll come over see how it's doing that all right so you can play with that later close that off okay we're good next thing we need to do is we need to cut the the contour the outside of it so what we're going to do here is we're gonna go ahead I'm going to do a new operation 2d milling 2d contour cut which is an outside cut for this we're going to use a three 3/16 which is a tool that I built in here flat bed now I've got a half inch of clearance on here I know this so I can use this to to cut my next to contour cut and that's the smallest bit I have that'll handle that now you may be able to go out and get a routing bid or something else there's also something you can get now I go to rock where right actually you might be able to go to Amazon and select a three millimeter two quarter inch adapter and let's see just throw the word router in there and you will see I know rock where has it go ahead a Rockler and we'll just go crash adapter see if we can find one of these okay you'll see one of these all right and you can find one of these to fit three millimeter and four millimeter or 1/4 inch 1/8 inch whatever and that way you can use Rotozip bits with your quarter-inch router okay and it's basically just a collet reducer all right you can get them on let's try Amazon again and we'll just call it call it adapter right quarter-inch to 1/8 inch boom here you go eight bucks you can find a three millimeter one so you can basically use whatever size bit you want you can go ahead and get a cheap one or you get a cheap pack of six over at Home Depot for six bucks all right helps out a lot anyways we're just going to use a 3/16 again we're going to disable this we're gonna tell it that our speed is 20,000 rpm geometry we're gonna come here now you see this little red arrow this means cut on the inside or cut on the outside because this is an outside contour cut and we want to trace the outside we're gonna leave this as the outside right so inside outside now one of the things that you're going to run into is if you cut it on the outside and you separate this from the rest of the stock this is going to start floating around and it's going to bump around that's why we have tabs so we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna create point two inch tabs and we're gonna go ahead and select the points so I'm gonna put one here I'm gonna put one here so to the other side stick one there stick one here what that'll do is when it does the cutting it'll cut through all the board but it's gonna raise up and it's gonna ignore this piece so you can cut that out with a jigsaw later or a different cutting tool whatever if you don't want it that big you can go ahead and hit one inch or a point one inch and it'll make these smaller mean we can go let's just go point one one five right okay so here's our point one five we'll come over their height we're not gonna retract that tie let's make sure here rest machining is turned off there is no stock to leave now for this we're gonna do multiple depths right because we wanted to cut through a couple times because we're in wood I know that I can safely do point one inch of wood without too much deflection which is where it starts bending the bit okay you have to watch out for that especially when you start going to thinner shanks Rotozip bits etc so we'll just do point one inch for a multiple depth no stock to leave no smoothing no feet opera optimization just gonna leave all that there you can explore that later let's see wrapping in you can ramp at two degrees I'm gonna ramp it for do lead in that's fine okay well hit OK here so now it's gonna generate your cutting path for the side to cut it out and you'll see on the little blue lines here see how it kind of comes in here's your red your ramp line and it'll cut in and you'll see how it kind of ramps in when once it comes back to this piece again comes down then it'll ramp in again come down to the next one cut it now when it gets to your tab it's gonna come in it's going to lift up the tool come down and then continuous cut and it'll do that you know all the way through so now we're good now we have our cut done we have our cuts defined now we've got to do the post-processing right so first thing we're gonna do remember here's zero right go ahead you're gonna right-click you're gonna hit post process now if this is your first time it's gonna run through Vaughn stop here saved right just always save always be saving you get a couple things done save it in case it crashes it's been known to happen this way you don't have to start over from scratch but you get a lot of good experience redoing the same thing over and over and over and over again come over here to post process now if this is the first time you're gonna do this it's gonna go ahead and say hey I have to install this I have to install this scripting this component you're gonna have to reboot your whole computer it's fine even if you're on Windows 10 it's going to make you reboot your old computer you will select tiny-g dot CPS from this drop-down there's tons of them out here you have it we're using the tiny-g shield so we're gonna use tiny-g don't worry about the output folder you can change that don't worry about this so once that's done you like post I'll come over here we'll call this step one cut out face save it now it's gonna open up this little window here this line here says the first thing you should do before anything else is go down to machine 0 and start so here's a little tip for when you're using the universal G code sender to send alright but let's go ahead and we'll delete this line we don't need it we don't want it and we'll hit save that's all you have to do to the to make sure that it's failsafe when you zero down you're going to bring your bet directly to this point which is Center stock ok so figure out the center the the X&Y center of your stock you're gonna place the bit right there on that dot and then you're gonna go over to the machine control or whatever your Universal g-code Center you're going to close the connection and then reopen the connection what that's going to do is it's going to set your software to zero and your machine to zero so both so both three columns are going to be at the zero zero zero zero zero zero if they're not um hit the hit your reset zero right or yeah just reset your XY musi close it turn it back on and then it will you know make sure it's a zero zero and you're good go back over to your where you can jog it and hit the Z up button a couple times just to make sure it's manually cleared and then you can go ahead and send this file that we just created and then later okay once that's done then you're going to change your bit to your bit that you're going to use to cut it out on the side you're gonna rezero it again go ahead and call this step to cut out part again we'll come out here to g00 get rid of that g-53 z0 save yes you'll put the cut up it directly back onto that spot now there is a thing you can do and here you go into the command window you do g-53 okay make sure that there's enough clearance on the bottom of your cutout bit to where you're you're starting out in right now as long as you don't turn anything off you're fine you do you type into the command window g-53 x zero space y zero what that'll do is that will move your bit directly on top of where your zero mark was then all you have to do is manually move your Z or Y or your bit back down exactly to where it's touching this okay then you'll go back over to your machine control and you will set you will go ahead and you'll close it and then you'll reopen it and it should reset everything back to zero zero zero zero zero zero go back over your machine control hit your Z up button a couple times so it's clearing this and then you send your second file alright so then you'll send this file here and then let it run and then that will cut out your entire part that's the easiest way I found using fusion 360 and the universal G code sender on the x-carve so hope this helps you out go ahead and try it let me know what you think if you want to a little a couple little tricks here one you go here to machining time you'll see that this one here will take 54 seconds this one here will take three minutes 45 seconds now if you look you'll see that it's not cutting this out there's not enough room for the bit and it's gonna collide with this right so if you want to get that cut out you'll make this a little bigger maybe take it up to seven inches by 7 inches do your carve the same way do your contour the same way and you'll look at this and you'll see that this will all come in here and right so adjust your size or adjust your bits so yeah that's that's what that means but really in a nutshell this is how you carve out this is this is what you do to do your first piece good luck if you have problems talk to us in the forums yeah that's it good luck Evan and I hope this helps

Channel: Dan Regalia

Views: 16,285

Keywords: XCarve, Fusion 360, Universal GCode Sender, Tutorial

Id: lV93eIhaED0

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2016