This is the brand new Stepcraft, hot off the presses comes out today and
I'm gonna show you five reasons why you might want a CNC in your wood
shop. At the end of the video, I'm going to tell you how you
can win one of these guys. Let's dive right in number one, and
this might be my favorite cool drawer. Organizers. I have a piece of plastic that I
know is exactly 10" wide by 14" long.
I will set this on the floor
and place my tool on here. Then I'm going to take my
camera and take a photo, making sure all four corners
of the plastic are in frame. I've imported my photos into the
computer. I've got them open in Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop,
there are great alternatives. There's this website called Photopea
it looks like a Photoshop clone, and it's all web based has almost all
the same identical tools and layout. Not sure how they get away with it. I own the Creative Suite
because this is my business. So I'm gonna use Photoshop
and illustrator today. So I'm gonna choose the
perspective crop tool. And then I'm going to draw around
the white plastic that I have. Then I'm going to move the
corners to the corner of plastic. And what this is going to do is
fix any perspective and is going to crop it down to the 10 by 14 inch
piece of plastic.
I will hit enter, fix perspective. I need to do
this with every single photograph. We've got 10 of 'em. So I'm
just moving on to the next one. Once we have all of those crop to
perspective, we can save all of them. Now you actually can do
all of this in Photoshop, but the next stages are just easier and
more familiar for me in illustrator. So once you're in illustrator, you
can import all of those photographs, change the size of those photographs
to match the size of that plastic background that we use and start tracing
everything out with the pen tool. Once you have all of 10 items traced out, you can then change the art board size
to match the drawer size and start rearranging until you find something
that you like. You can save this, import this into Vcarve, set your tool pass and export that out
to the machine and start cutting your drawer organizer. You could probably do
all of this in Vcarve, just one piece, the software, but I'm using
what I'm familiar with. And then I prefer to use Vcarve to set
my feeds and speeds and send that to the CNC.
I am cutting this
out of this pink, purple. I don't know if that's pink or
purple you decide foam insulation. I like to use this because it's fairly
inexpensive and it's a great test piece whenever I'm cutting something out on
a CNC and I just wanna make sure all my dimensions are great. This
insulation foam is perfect. I might end up using
this as my final piece, but you could also cut this tool
drawer foam on the CNC as well. I should mention cutting insulation.
It's so light and fluffy.
It's gonna make a mess.
We should drop in there. Just like, so that worked out really well. A couple of adjustments that I would need
to make if I was going to cut this out of real foam, but I think I'm just
going to use the pink insulation. It's nice and cheap. It's
easy as I add more tools, I already have the file that I
need. I can just easily modify that. And now for my favorite
method is router templates. So now I have this template I can keep
at the router that has different Radis radi on each corner here. And I've got a piece of Walnut
double-sided tape to this. So now I can get perfect round edges
here at the router every single time.
So now with the pattern bit in our router, we got a perfect radius on
our work piece. With the CNC, you can make a ton of broader templates
to speed up your work process,.Precise tool set up jigs. Let's say I want set the fence on my
jointer to a certain angle that I know I'm going to repeat over and over
again throughout the years, I ha I can cut this out and
then use that to set my fence, lock that down. I can always keep this on hand
and always go back to that cut. But my favorite tool set up jig is
over at the table, saw, let's say, I want to cut a 12 segment ring. I cut out this tool set at a
75 degree angle on the CNC. I can place this against my
blade. Angle the miter gauge, lock that down and cut segments all day. And then that is dead on
balls, accurate for myself. I would make a template for 12 segments, and I would also do another one for
24 and then maybe a couple in between. And then just keep that with all my
table saw jigs for insanely accurate tool set jigs.
This. Might be your favorite reason
to have a CNC in the shop. And that is personalizing your work. This is just a simple Vcarve with a
90 degree bit using times Roman only takes one pass quick and easy. And my fifth reason, which is
definitely my favorite is precise cuts. Let's say you need to make a shape
that needs to be an exact size. You can do that with a CNC. Obviously I am gonna cut to speaker
front and I need two perfectly sized circles in there. What better
machine than a CNC to do that for me? Perfect. That's just five things. There are dozens of more reasons why
you might want a CNC in the shop. Maybe you wanna get into production,
repeatable things, saving yourself, time in the shop while the CNC does one
thing, and you could do something else. There are lots of things. CNCs can do
that. You as a human couldn't do for me, the CNC compliments, the other
things that I do in the shop.
For me, it is not a replacement for a human. I still like making
manual cuts at the table, saw and at the miter
saw and using a router. And then I like to use the CNC for things
that I couldn't do by hand. For you, maybe you don't have
room for an entire shop. I'm pretty lucky that I have the
space for all these woodworking tools. I imagine if you just had a CNC, you could use the CNC to flatten
your boards, to joint your boards, to do cross cuts and rips and to
route it could replace your bandsaw. The CNC could actually be your
entire shop. Like I mentioned, at the top of the video, this is the
brand new offering from Stepcraft. This is the new revised D 600
hot off the presses just came out today. You have a couple of different
options when it comes to the table, I have the aluminum one here.
You can get it preassembled.
Or if you wanna save yourself a few
bucks, you can assemble it yourself. We are given one of these
away over on my Instagram. So if you're lucky enough to see this
video in time, head on over there, you gotta like my Instagram page. You
gotta like the stepcraft Instagram page, and you gotta leave a comment.
That is gonna wrap it up. Thank you for watching as
always be safe, have fun, stay passionate and make something..