Hi all this is the MakeHaven
badging video for the Shapeoko so in the shapeoko is a CNC router that means
it's computer numerically controlled that's controlled by the computer so anytime where you
want something done that would be difficult to do by hand either because you want to be really
precise or it's a cool design or something that requires milling with a bit in a way that would be
difficult by hand this this could be the tool of choice so for example if you wanted to make
a perfect circle without drilling a hole in the middle for a jig on the bandsaw would be one
example or you wanted to do a name in a cutting board or you wanted to do an inlay these are all
examples of when you might need to use this photo there's some examples around this is one where
the bit cut down and then it was filled with resin to make a sort of in length these are some
others where there is a walnut veneer on plywood in using the bit you can cut through the veneer
and then it pops so there a lot of different uses the the mill part of the CNC or CNC router
name means that the bits that it's using can cut down but they can also cut sideways so versus a
normal drill bit they can only cut up and down these can cut sideways too so that's that's what
this is the size of the bed of the cutting area is about 30 inches by 31 inches so that's kind
of the biggest footprint you can work with and there's no variable speed control which means
that you just pick the speed that's where you get and for the most part let's say for the vast
majority cases that's totally fine so in terms of controlling it we are gonna use this computer and
it uses a program called easel which is web-based which is really nice because that means you can
do all your designing outside either on some of the make human computers or on your own computer
and then just log in here and get them and that's nice because then you know your computer doesn't
need to get dusty and sit here while this is doing this thing so we'll look at how easel here if
the computer isn't on then I'll just turn on I'll go to Google Chrome it looks like there's
even a link right there but I'm just gonna go to easel and it brings us to Inventables and we'll
click on explore easel and now it already logged us into the make Haven account and so this is
just a general account that you're more than welcome to use if you just want to make something
quickly but if you want to bring in something from your own account and you'll want to make a free
account with Inventables so that you can make it on your computer and then log in here so we'll
just click on new project so the workspace that we have has a bunch of cool things so this is
where we do our designing and this dotted line shows the size of our work piece and over here
on the right side is a simulation showing our work piece and so whatever we do inside these
dotted lines will show up over here we'll start from the beginning so you're gonna choose your
material so here you choose the type of material and its dimensions so to type we have a piece
of wood here that's oak and we'll try to find oak in this list and I don't see oak but it's
similar to soft maple so we'll just choose that and that just helps inform the computer what
kind of settings choose for how quickly it should move and then in terms of the dimensions
it looks like about eighteen inches by six to me so X is the dimensions side to side and then
Y is the dimension for and backwards and Z that thickness is the down so this is pretty
important so we'll just measure this to make sure and there's three quarters of an inch so here
we'll select three quarters 0.75 we're good to go and so now this piece of what here represents
the piece of wood we have on the table and the leader will look at these other settings so in
terms of what we can do here there are a bunch of things you can choose from to make our design
this is one example of taking a bunch of different shapes and putting them together so zoom in so
we can see more easily what's going on here so you can see that this is a box of a bunch of
other shapes added to it and we'll just we'll just delete what they made because just make it
ourselves so we have different shapes here and so the shapes even for example is square and with a
square you choose the depth of cut so because we told it that our materials three quarters of an
inch that's the deepest you can go that would cut all the way through so you can see the simulation
as a whole there or we can go half way through and now it's if we zoom in here you see there's just
like a little dent little cutout there but not going all the way through so that's if you want
to cut in a fill so fill means we will cut out all the material on the inside outline means it'll
cut just on that line that we made but then we have a choice when you do the outline of whether
to do on the paths that bit is gonna follow the square that we drew outside that means it will
leave a hole in the shape of the square that we drew or inside and so then on outside will be the
line that we drew and that may seem trivial but that can be very important depending on what your
trying to do then some of the things you can do or click Edit points so what that means is that
you can take these points and move them around so this makes it kind of like a like Inkscape or
something or illustrator where you have sort of the vector editing capabilities you just drag
this points around and make it whatever shape you want you can also tell it say for this corner
to make it curved so it's a curved point then you can do it like that and then we're gonna click
on shape and this the first option under shape is the position and so we're gonna zoom back
out here and so this is X the x coordinate is our y coordinate and right now when we have this
shape it's talking about the lower left corner of the shape so it's putting an imaginary box around
this weird shape and we made and saying that the lower left-hand corner there's an exposition
of 0.5 it's right about here and a Y position of 0.6 which is there so it's saying that the
corner of this shape is right about here that could be useful but let's say we wanted it to be
a little so you wanted to refer to the middle of the shape which is right there so let's say
we wanted to get circles or something where the middle mattered and then you can say we want
the middle of it to be 3 inches and 2 inches high and so that's that's one we've controlling the
position if you want to be more precise about the position of your of your design on your workpiece
and then the size this allows you to just scale it up and down so you can lock it here let's say
we want to make the width actually 3 and now just make the whole thing bigger you can rotate it
and those those are most of the choices there and then for each shape they're pretty similar
might be sound like a star yep no that's that's the same too so for the shapes that's that's how
it works for the line tool you just draw points there we go so you click escape together to
recognize your line and then same deal for drill let's say you want to drill holes in your
piece so you can mark exact you want those where you want those holes to be and it will drill
a hole right into it text there's another good one that gets used a lot and so here you have
your text same idea with whether you want it to be outline or fill I think this is a good point
to start talking about the bits that we're gonna be using so let's zoom in on this word text let's
say we use a really big bit for cutting this out it won't be able to get in this corner because the
bit is a circle and so if it's a big circle it's not gonna be you be able to make that nice crisp
corner so we need to just figure out how crisp you want it to be so that means if you wanted to be
really crisp use a really small bit but that means it'll take a while so that's a balance you need to
sort of figure out we can look at over here where how you make that choice that was point one five
inches and that means that's the diameter of the bit but here we can select the most common types
so here is one thirty seconds is a pretty small bit and then one-sixteenth one-eighth these are
all up cut bits so even gives a little description here but an up cut bit is gonna spin and pull
the chips out of the hole and what that means is it's good for getting the dust out it's good
for cutting quickly but it's gonna leave kind of a rough finish up if the top edge is just hearing
the material out so the other kinds of bits are down cut bits so that's gonna be worse at getting
the chips out but it'll give a smoother finish on the top a rougher finish on the bottom that's a
trade-off then there is a whole world of kinds of bits or compression bits that are up cut and
down cut there are straight cut bits there v cut bits in case you want to just do some lettering or
something where you just and conveniently there's a little shopping cart right next to it so you can
you can buy them right from them in general what I do is I just type in the diameter because that's
the most important piece so let's say we're using a quarter inch bit you're just pretty big you'd
put in point two five and now you have a 0.25 inch bit so if you were to go out and buy bits on your
own it would be kind of annoying to wait and pay for shipping so we have a few bits here for sale
so those are over here these CNC bits are we have a few sizes I think they are all up spiral bits
so these look like quarter inch and their eighth and sixteenth inch bits so you can pay at the cash
box by the 3d printers or at Makehaven.org/store and here they're the prices so it's like $6 four
sixteenth 8 for a quarter and twelve for a quarter inch and so that's one option where you can get
them yourself or in this box we just have some public spares that have been left over so you're
welcome to pick among these so we'll look more at those ones we actually put the bit in the machine
but the point we were trying before is that right now we put a bigger bit in here so right now we
made it a quarter inch and we'll see what happens here so and you can see that the letters look
pretty mushy and we'll take this text and make it smaller just to exaggerate this point so here
if I made a text really small and then we go and zoom in here we'll click simulate so simulates
in this lower right hand corner and it's going to see what its gonna look like and you can see
that the word text doesn't even show up because our quarter inch bit is too big to fit inside of
those letters but if we made the word text bigger then it starts to show up but you can see that
it doesn't look great like you can't get into a little bit of the e most of the t so let's say we
wanted to look better we would then try using say an 8 inch bit and click on here and now now it
looks a lot better is that eighth inch bit can get in there still doesn't have the sharp corners
the rounded corners cuz it's a rounded bit and then to the extreme we could use like a 32nd inch
bit and now that starts to look much more like it looks here so you can see the trade-off though is
that the time is going to take much longer and the way that we get around that is by clicking this
plus button and then it lets us use the detail of it the the bigger bit is going to be taking out
most of the material that's this one and then the detail bit the smaller one that's going to be
doing just the detail work is this one so here we it has to be smaller bit obviously because it's
just doing the detail stuff and so that can be a way of getting both the detail and saving yourself
time so that's that's kind of how the bits section works then we're gonna finish up the things over
here so icons nothing crazy icons and then these are pretty cool so these are apps and here these
are like little programs within easel they'll let you do neat things instead of figuring out all
yourself so for example for an inlay you would make your design and then click on this app and it
would make the two cutouts so you need one cut out to cut out your material it's going to be going
in your for example cutting board and then your other one is going to be doing the the part that's
removing the wood the negative piece and so this automatically does that for you instead of you
trying to have to figure out how to make those to match up so it's just that there's a little
video here to show you what that means so we'll make these two pieces so you'll cut out one half
cut out the other and then you have this little piece and it fits in just like that there's a box
maker so this is a pretty good one if you just want to make a quick box with shapeoko puzzles
mazes spinet fidget spinners so these are fun to poke through a feature in easel that's really
useful it's called tabs and that is under the cut settings so if we have something like this text
right now we're not cutting all the way through but if we were to cut all the way through then
the the middle of the tee would be totally loose and would come flying out and the bit could break
it could come flying out it's all kinds of bad so these little tabs these little yellow things pop
up and what they are little raised pieces of wood so the bit will come along come up over and down
so it will still be attached by a little piece of wood and when you're done you can just use a
little razor blade or something to cut through the tab and over here you can control whether or
not you want it to use the tabs the length of them right now they're a quarter inch point zero eight
inches high which is good for most things but if you have like a warpy material on point the weight
might not get through you can increase it and here you can control the quantity so let's say for
here we had a bunch more letters we would need more tabs to get to all those letters and you
want to make sure that your tabs are covering all the little bits and pieces so the middle of
the E here is gonna come flying out so you need to make sure that there's a tab that's gonna
hold that piece of the e in there and similar over here so that's pretty important to make sure
that all the pieces stay where you want them to stay that's like one of the most common ways for
a cut to fail on the shapeoko and then last but certainly not least is importing so let's say you
had an SVG a vector file you could import it right in here and then it would use that line to trace
you can import G code so let's say you use fusion 360 and or SolidWorks and wanted to import that G
code into here then you would click G code to go in that to go into that a little more deeply this
machine using ezel has 2.5 dimensions of movement or axis of movement so that means is that it can
move x and y totally fluidly but if you wanted to do things at two different layers you would
have to set them here so we could have our text for example at a quarter inch and then this line
all the way through but that bit would move around and then go to a different depth and move around
if it wouldn't make smooth curves between those different depths that would be fully three axis
of movement so ezel doesn't do that but if you wanted to do that you can do it in something like
fusion 360 or SolidWorks and then you would use their cam program so CAD computer-aided design
lets you design it and then cam is pewter aided machining which actually comes up with the G code
and G code is what tells these motors what to do and so you can use and then ezel as CAD and cam
put together so using something like SolidWorks you could come up with that code the G code and
import that directly into here and then that would get rid of all these options and is just going to
do exactly what you tell it to do so you need to make sure that you're feeling pretty good about
what you tell it because if you tell it to run right off the side it's gonna try to do that if
you tell just your straight down it's gonna do that because it's just listening to whatever you
tell to do so that's importing another cool one is image trace so let's say you have an image
and you want to try to use it in the shapeoko it will try to trace it for you which is similar
to like a vector trace feature in Illustrator or Inkscape and then you can import a DXF file so
those are the options here then we're going to go and look quickly at our cut settings before we
go over to actually getting this thing started so cut settings are how it cuts so it gives us these
recommended settings feed rate is how quickly it's gonna move side to side right now it's set to 28
inches per minute plunge rate is how quickly goes up and down DEP your pass is how much it takes
off each time it goes that's for the roughing and then for detail it has different settings well
they happen to be the same but you can set them differently so let's say you're doing your cut
and you see actually this is taking a long time it can go faster then you could increase your feed
rate or actually it looks like the bits bending a little bit or I broke this really small bit then
you would slow it down so it doesn't it doesn't do that doesn't overload the machine and last time
here is the fill method offset is more of a spiral and raster goes back and forth oh that's like
raster is only for pro so we just have offset which has always been fine for me so those are the
cut settings all right so now we've told it that we are going to do and just for the purpose of
this we're gonna get rid of the detail bit so I'm just going to click this little X but it's it's
not much different so we see we have an eighth inch bit in there so we're gonna load up an eighth
inch bit we're gonna look at changing the bits now when this is not being controlled by the computer
so we're gonna move this over here but now to get under this bit to get the bit in here we need to
get a little more clearance so you want to raise this up and this this axis you can't move by hand
you can only move with the computer so I forgot to mention this before but in general we just
always leave this machine on there is a power switch down here but and right now it's on and you
can just leave it on if you were to turn it off and the next person needs to restart the computer
to get it to talk to it again so in general that just stays on so we're gonna go to carve and tell
it to move up that's a little more room to work with this is the dust shoe that collects dust you
just pull this great thing out yellow come comes off and now we have access to the bottom so on
the bottom there are a few things going on it's a little hard to see but I'm gonna push this
pin in here and what that's gonna do is lock the spindle which will allow me to spin this guy
out and as opposed to something like a drill which uses a chuck that you can change the size of this
uses collets and collets just have one size so in this collet you can only fit aside like a one
size a bit in here it goes in here and then when you tighten it it pinches it because it has the
little slits in it and then tightens down on it so you need to make sure that you have the right
size collet for the right size bit so now we'll look at some of these other columns and bits
we selected an 8 inch and conveniently this is an 8 inch so this is an eighth inch bit that will
fit right into it so that's gonna convenient let's say me we wanna go quarter inch bit and this is a
quarter inch collet that's very stuck on the bit this is also a quarter-inch and so you would use
this for your other for your quarter inch shank so sometimes you will have bits that have different
size shanks than the size of their actual cutting head for example this one so they're not the same
size so you need to make sure that the part that the collar is holding on to is the right size
for that card so we use this guy this bit is a little short so here's a longer one I'll just
make it easier to see what's going on same thing just longer and because this cut I don't really
care about I'm just using them from the public bin if this was my own cut and I really wanted
to be really nice I want to really sharp a new bit so I just want to may own or buy it from
here cutting deep into a material you need to make sure that your bit can reach that depth so
for a bit like this the shank is significantly wider than the actual flutes you can cut down
a half-inch but after that this is just gonna be pushing into your wood and it couldn't start a
fire just from the friction of rubbing up against the wood at 2,000 rpm versus a bit like this where
the flutes are the same as the shank so this can go even past this three quarter inch depth it may
not cut super well because the sawdust would have a hard time escaping but it at least it can go
that deep and if you want to try to go really deep than you grab a bit with even longer flutes
so that you can reach even farther depths so for this this is the trickiest part of the whole
situation so first you're just gonna screw this up in there you're gonna have to pull the
pin in to make sure it doesn't spin on you right so now that's in there you're pushing the
pin in and then slide this up and you have to hold it with your fingers doesn't just drop it out
if you aren't holding the bit it'll just well normally it just falls right out and then you need
to tighten it so now you're using all kinds of body parts to hold it in place so the this because
we're looking at it from the top you're gonna turn it to the left to tighten it and it's a little
in case you forget that there's a little image on the side so it shows this way is locked and
this way is unlocked so I'm holding this button with my thumb and I'm holding this my other finger
twisting and tightening it and then just to make sure that it's extra tight I'm gonna grab this
wrench off of the wall and so this goes onto this collet nut apart that's holding to collet and
again I have to still to hold this top button it pops in place and just give an extra a little
bit of torque just to hold on there really snugly because it'd be a real bummer if it came out
spinning it a few thousand rotations per minute so then you put our dust shoe back on and this pin
back in as you can see these are just 3d printed which is kind of cool and now that's all set up
so now we to think about how we're gonna hold this material down and so you can see that there are
holes throughout this table for clamps so we're gonna go over here and grab some clamps and these
are just little leavers three of them and because they're wood it isn't the end of the world if
a if the bit hits them it's obviously not great I mean to make new ones and It'll probably mess
up your print but it's not like anything's gonna catastrophic break so the way these work is this
is the fulcrum and it needs to be higher than your piece of wood so I'm going to screw these out so
that it's a little bit higher in our wood and then put another screw in or bolt into here to hold it
down it needs to be at a bit of a downward angle if it's an upward angle she's gonna smush the
piece right out put a downward angle hold these in I'm going to grab the screwdriver off of the wall
make this process a little easier okay that's one and I'm not screwing it all the way down super
tightly just yet because we're not actually doing a lot of cutting two should be fine you
generally want as many clamps as possible I'd say like probably the biggest the most common way
for this to fail is that your piece moves while you're cutting there's a lot of vibration there's
a lot of cutting forces we want it to be really secure like I said I'm not totally tightening just
yet I'll just leave it like that okie dokie so now we're gonna come back over here and we want to
make sure this is totally straight so when we do our design it's going to be in line with our piece
let's say you're doing a cutout you wanted to make a little cut out a rabbit it wouldn't matter
if this was straight because it's gonna be cut out so it doesn't matter what it's orientation
is to the piece of wood unless you care about some feature in the world or the grating or
something like that but you don't care we're here we don't care or no where they do care so
we're gonna bring this down to the lower left-hand corner and now we can see the interval so this
is pretty important right now it's set to move a point one inches for every click so I remove
this it was point one inches but that's gonna take us a while to get there so you can choose one
inch and that's gonna move a lot and that's great however if I were to click down like two inches
right now it would just stick it right into the table and things would break and so when you're
moving at 1 inches at a time per interval you need to be really careful about how much you're
clicking so I give you tempting scope click clicking like clicking a whole bunch and then
you realize it's just gonna slam it off the side so you need to when you're wanting to be really
conscious of your gonna come over here and then go X left a little bit to the ballpark and then
you click down once and then after that I'm gonna just use the point 1 intervals now it's a point 1
you can also enter custom controls here there are custom increments lined up just with that so it
looks to me like we're pretty well lined up with that edge so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
bring it back up so you can get over that clamp that we put down put it in one-inch and move it
all the way over to the right side and I'll bring it back down it is no longer anywhere close to
be lined up with a piece of wood so what we're gonna do is just scooch this guide down there we
go so now it's lined up with a bit again it's now it's lined up but to bit on the right side we'll
run it back to the left just to make extra sure maybe here so you see this this is the process
for getting it lined up straight there you could if you're doing a bunch of pieces you could like
screw or nail or something a piece of wood into here so you line it up with your it's flat every
time but because so many people are doing so many things different things on here it doesn't make
sense for us to have a permanent origin marking piece that explains this this process right
so now let's just clean this up a little bit so we're not doing all these different things so
I'm just gonna delete some of these things always have this well just we'll just do this weird
shape and now a pretty important step is making sure that we're not gonna hit the clamp so we're
gonna click simulate again and we can see some of the other material things that tells us it's
to take about five minutes so that's pretty good to know and it's gonna show us the path that it's
gonna take so it's gonna start in this corner and then it's gonna come over and just go around and
what that means is we can't have any plants that are gonna be in the path of its travel to make
sure clamps are over here or away from where it's going to be cutting that's pretty important
and it looks like good so we're tucked away in the corner and now I'm gonna tighten these down
now that we know it's in the right place okay that's tight and now we're ready to carve
so we're gonna go over to carve and it says measure the material so enter the exact thickness
of material you measure it was 0.75 inches that's important because it was actually thinner and
we're going all the way through then I'd be cutting into the table and we'd rather not put
into the table obviously some people have but if you are gonna go all the way through try to go a
teensy bit all the way through so that you're not jamming all this deep way into the table so we're
gonna confirm material thickness check clamp down the material we just did that so the material
is secure confirm your bit it is an eighth inch so it's actually a spiral and up cut bit so let's
see if that's an option eighth inch up cut there we go so that's a little more accurate I don't
think that would change anything but make you sleep easier tonight and then we can go to work
zero so move the machine to the lower left corner of your material so we're pretty close to the
bottom where we're not at the left corner so you go left over and then the way that I normally
do this is I look at it from this position to see if it's exactly lined up on this edge and you
want the middle of the bit to be lined up with the middle with it with the edge not like not
the edge of the bit in the middle a bit lined up with the edge of the wood so that's zero one
and go up just here alright that's lined up and then I'm gonna go from this perspective it needs
to go left alright that's perfectly lined up there and then the last trick is taking a piece of
paper and putting it underneath here and you want it to do just so here you can you can hear
that the bit is scraping the piece of paper and so we'll set it to the small setting point zero
zer one go down a little more and so now it's just it's pinching the paper and that means are
really close to the surface if you really want to be super precise and now you can even go down
one more just to make up for that thickness of the paper so now we're all set for the bit is we
move to work zero let's say you're doing multiple cuts in a row you could just click used last home
position and I mean you wouldn't need to reset the home position you could just use the one you used
before so lookin for a home position now I'm gonna say raise the bit it's gonna raise it for us just
moved up and we're gonna tell it that dust shoe is attached confirmed and we're not gonna turn
the spindle on you are gonna turn the vacuum on which is down here and this tool is pretty
loud so your probably gonna want ear protection and then turn the spindle on by pulling this up so I just paused it so that we can talk about
what's happening here so the pause button was over here and that just stops it but it doesn't
cancel it said we could click play and it would start up again but you need to make sure that
the spindle in fact we're back on some of the other things you can do here or you can see if
it was just going too slowly you think you can cut faster you can click the plus button and
it will cut up to 200% faster or you can go the other direction you can slow it down and then
let's say something was going badly something had moved something there's a problem then you can
click the X button and it will cancel and you turn the router off one of the dangers with this
CNC with the CNC router is starting a fire so occasionally a bunch of sawdust will build up and
there's air blowing and there's a spindle moving really quickly and it will start fire and so in
that case you should just be able to turn this off and turn the vacuum off and it'll take care
of itself if it's bad obviously you got the fire extinguisher in general the problems that happen
here you can hear you'll it will break the bit will break something will move you just come over
and turn it off and It'll be annoying but nothing catastrophic is important that you stay certainly
within earshot and preferably within eyeshot of this Shapeoko while it's running so that you can
hear if something messes up and see it and react to it so that's that's pretty important however
this can run for hours at a time so sometimes you know if you can just make sure you're listening
to it normally that will indicate if there's a problem if you're just so wanting to stop it
really quickly you could push the off button but that's just gonna stop a movement the spindle is
still gonna be spinning so you need to push that turn that off in addition so then let's say you
did finish the cut and what we'll do so I'm gonna click play again after I turn the spindle on it's
gonna move a little bit and I'm just gonna click the X button to stop it because we don't need to
watch it do the whole thing and it's gonna come right back to this position and if you just let it
finish it on its own it would also come right back and so it says these were the feed rates and
whatnot they were used if it didn't turn out well which it suspects because we hit the
X button then you could say sad face and it'll give you some suggestions for how
to improve it in the future when you're done the the vacuum does collect most of the
dust but you want to make sure that you do any backing up that you need to put the bits
and the clamps away have fun making things
