real quick i want to thank this
video sponsor which is keeps i did my first cnc project back in august
of 2015. it has been six years exactly and i have gone from one hobbyist machine to a crazy
impressive lineup of four professional machines come into my commercial shop called the woodshed
and let me give you a tour of my cnc business in case you're not familiar with how a cnc works
especially if you have multiple machines let me take you through the process on loading them
up running them and then repeating the process and then i'll get into more details about the
overall business of it i primarily use these two machines for my template making business and then
this one for more detailed or elaborate jobs so first thing in the morning all of the machines
start up at every single machine they each have their own individual computer jacob has designed
and put together some plywood furniture actually cut out on the cnc in order to house a computer
used for that specific machine the shop saver unit actually comes with its own pedestal so we didn't
have to create anything special for that one when loading up the cnc machine the vast
majority of what i'm using these machines for is quarter inch mdf it's a little bit thinner
of material meaning that if i'm not using a vacuum bed which these two machines don't have
a vacuum that means that it needs a lot of hold downs to hold the sheet nice and flat so that
you'll get a nice consistent cut throughout the entire sheet jacob has come up with these very
savvy unique hold downs for these machines and so what we do is use an electric screwdriver to
go through and tighten down on every single one it has a built-in torque setting that won't allow
you to over tighten and it drastically speeds up this process then we use two quick squeeze
clamps for the middle of each end whenever we use thicker material we don't have to use as
many hold downs as this quarter inch requires next we can run the file and then you can see
both of the carriages start coming this way once the full sheet is ran now i can pull the
material off of it a while back i actually bought a sitting standing desk and jacob salvaged it
from my workshop because i never bothered to take it out of the box and put it together and he
turned it into a raising and lowering workbench for the use of this so that you can raise it up
to a height needed where you can just pull it up to the cnc drag the material off go to the next
one drag it off and then as the sheets pile up you can raise or lower it so that the height is
always where you need it to be now at this point all of these parts need to be popped out
so that they can start being processed we have tried several things over
the years and kind of a method that we've refined is just using brute force throwing
in a piece of wood in order to pick it up and then using some sort of tool in order to bump
out each and every part it breaks through those thin tabs without breaking the part by the way
if you're not familiar a tab is a small piece of material that's left behind whenever you're
doing the actual profile cut that will hold the piece to the material that you're cutting that
way it doesn't just get flown across the shelf tabs are mostly necessary whenever you're running
machines that don't have a vacuum bed they're really great for making sure that your parts don't
go flying however once the parts are broken out of the waste material now that waste material gets
thrown over into the waste bin and then all the parts get taken over to a shelving unit in order
to get de-tabbed the d-tabbing station is simply a router table i'm personally using the triton
work center with their router mounted underneath i'm using a vacuum hooked up to it in order to try
to maintain good dust control then for a bit i'm using something called a panel pilot flush trim
bit it's slightly different because it doesn't have a bearing like a traditional flush trim
bed which makes it far easier to work on thinner pieces of material i think that's why they call
it a panel pilot flush trim bed as you can see you can very quickly get into a groove here and just
fly through all of this once it's all d tab then it gets set over into the rack and our personal
system is to create a master of everything because we do a lot of templates by the way if you
want woodworking templates you know where to go the way that we distinguish them is by
painting them blue and then engraving in what that part number sku is the name of it so
then whenever we d-tab them it's just a matter of finding that master and then piling it underneath
it this is also our quick reference on which part we need to cut next now going back to the cnc
machines the beds need to be vacuumed off which would just keep a separate vacuum underneath pull
it out it can reach both units and then we rinse and repeat the process go back to the material
rack pull in new material tighten down on all the hold downs and then run the next part the masters
are also really good at these are the originals and so every part from here on out should look
like these and so it's really a quick reference should things start looking different that we need
to go back and either look at the file or look at the machine and see where it's gotten off right
now this is our inventory system it has taken me a lot of trial and error to figure out how to
ship out templates without them getting damaged into the mail personal process is to use some
bubble wrap and also stacking the mdf in order to use the material in order to create some rigidity
in the packaging using this method has allowed me to mix the box and instead use a poly mailer
which is just like a kind of a plastic bag that comes in different lengths and sizes at
this point it gets sent over to my mom who is of course the shipping department and then
whenever you guys place an order she sticks a label on it and then it gets sent out into the
mail so i did this process by myself for a solid year with the help of my mom she's always been the
shipping department uh then in 2020 i heard jake and he very quickly took over the cnc work and
then since then i've hired uh cindy terry david yeah you justin but you don't you don't
ship packages do you want to ship packages we need another hand with the help of my
crew i have now been able to take this from a single machine which by the way the laguna
is still in my personal shop and probably will remain for the foreseeable future but we can
still use it so now in 20 what year are we in 2021 where's the time gone now in the year
2021 i have six people running four machines and it's it's incredible i wanted to show you the
detailed steps that it takes to run the machine but now let me show you the entire
shop with all of us at our stations so i get asked the question quite often how did
i get to this position let me go back to the beginning and kind of explain why what my aim is
and my transition here so back in 2019 whenever i got my laguna and i really started understanding
the full capability of what a 4×8 robot could be and doing for me i started thinking i
want to create a business that lives outside of me creating content because
what happens one of these days whenever you guys don't want to watch my videos or maybe
i can't or don't want to be making videos anymore i want to have something that still involves me
in the making world without having to to follow one path and so i started seeing the possibilities
on maybe i could be creating an additional revenue stream now and then possibly a future career right
and so the laguna for me was a huge breakthrough it had a vacuum bed and it allowed me to start
making templates and selling it to my audience in small doses and that worked for a while
but then whenever it ramped up in order to go to the next level i now needed another
machine and so then i got into a shopbot was just happenstance that i ran across a good
opportunity to get into the shopbot and it has been a all of my machines have been wonderful so
at this point this is whenever i purchased the woodshed and uh was doing the renovation my goal
was to get all of the employees that i was hiring to work on these machines and and process parts
out of my personal shop so that i could retain my own space but then also give them a shot to work
out of so during that timeline that's whenever i purchase the woodshed and these machines came
over here y'all probably know this about me but i'm just not okay with just staying here i want
to go here and i want to go fast i only had room for one more machine at least at this point and
when considering what machine that was going to be i am very serious about production and so i
went with a shop saver i believe every single machine on the market has its place and i'm
very fortunate to have the lineup that i have but this one is a serious commercial unit that
will absolutely take my business to the next level one cnc machine is a business and its own what
it does is it automates a process that you would otherwise have to do manually over and over
and over again if you're a cabinet maker for example one of these machines is a business all
in itself now the shopsaber machine automates even more processes than that machine does now that i'm
trying to get to a higher level of a manufacturing shop automating as many processes as possible is
key so let me get into a few things on what this machine does in order to help me there one of
the big obvious upgrades is that this does have a vacuum bed the vacuum is actually stored at the
rear of the machine on the ground and of course the laguna machine that i have is also a vacuum
bud so i was already familiar about how much of an upgrade this is for the cnc however it's
worth noting listen to how quiet this machine is this is with the vacuum pump and the spindle
running what the vacuum bed allows is there is a vacuum underneath that creates suction to suck
down the spoil board as well as your material to the bed so that you don't have to have either tabs
at all depending on how big or small the part is smaller parts like this they definitely do need
tabs but we run lots of material that don't need tabs because it has a vacuum bed one of the
main struggles with cnt is figuring out how to hold down the material with the vacuum bed
and just relying on that suction to pull it all the way down it eliminates that completely
then looking at the process that also kills whenever i have to walk over to one of these
other machines and go to every single one of the hold downs to tighten or untighten it completely
eliminates that step then taking it a step further shopsaber has automated the process of loading
material even easier by having reference pens they have a cordless pendant which is also a really
nice feature but the reference pens are these that's not cool that's like some space stuff so what what that will do is one you can take off
the material but then whenever you want to load it back you pop up the pins and now you can reference
your uh material all the way to the bottom and all the way to the left of the machine making if i
wanted to cut 50 of these then i can make sure that they're all in this in the same spot to
do that just for the fun sake of it besides the vacuum bed the biggest upgrade that i'm absolutely
in love with that is a game changer to me is the automatic tool changer typically on a cnc if
you have a job let's say i cut out a bunch of charts that first require an engraving bit and
then you come back with a regular end mill in order to do the profile to cut out the profile of
the chart you have to manually change over that bit to from an engraving bit to the end mill and
then back to the engraving bit for the next sheet that process only takes i don't know 45 to 45
seconds to a minute but still that time counts you can have 10 tools lined up here then
whenever it's done doing all of the engraving it will automatically come back here release the
engraving bit pick up on the end mill and then go immediately into the profile cutting another
thing that the atc eliminates is having to zero z in between bit changes so whenever you put in a
new bit it measures the height of it and then you z it out it'll remember that so that whenever it
comes over and swaps out the engraving bit for the profile bit it doesn't have to re-zee it at that
point it can just automatically go in and start cutting watch how shop saber has incorporated the
dust dock what this does is it removes the dust boot before it goes and picks up the new tool this
has been a real big point of frustration for cnc owners so the fact that they've automated this is
just really neat by the way i want to address this noise real quick because it's actually a really
cool feature you have to hook up an air compressor to this unit and it's always dispensing a small
amount of air in order to make sure that no dust gets up into the system so that's why you're
going to hear that throughout this entire video now in order to maximize precision the shop saver
unit is upgraded to this ball screw system here and watching this thing work is just incredible
to on most cnc's i think all other cnc's it uses a rock and pinion system with the rack and pinion
system there's always going to be at least a tiny bit of play and this ball screw system completely
eliminates that all right let's move up here because i also think that this is a really cool
feature so typically one of the axes that you're most limited by is your z-axis and on whenever
i'm cutting fraction to decimal charts for example there's so much lettering it does an a it picks
up and then goes down to the next letter then it picks up and goes down to the next level and
all of that z up and down motion just makes the time it takes to cut an entire sheet incredibly
long z is notoriously gonna be your slowest axis to work long because it's always gonna have to
raise and lower the weight of the spindle head what shopsaber has done is they have included an
air cylinder or an air piston that is calibrated to counterbalance the weight of that spindle head
and that way it can move up and down drastically increasing cut speed and therefore reducing run
time one thing i'm really excited about is the ability to add a laser to this shop saver so
this is something made by opt lasers out of i believe they're polish and they just mount
right here on the side of the shop saver allowing me to very quickly go from not only the
capabilities of a traditional cnc but now having laser capabilities as well this unit is a six
watt unit that allows me to do some engraving passes but note that they do also make a 15
watt unit that has a three laser diode blue engraving laser head it can also engrave on steel
or cut up to three millimeter plywood in one pass there's quite a few different directions that
i could get into for my cnc business but um i get i think to wrap it up let me at least show
you the workflow that we've figured out so far to work best for us with the machines being here
facing them this way and being able to have rows in between them has been very really valuable all
of the dust collection and the vacuum bed pumps are on that end of the of the cnc's on this end
each one of the pedestal lives a workbench not for working on but just for moving around material
from the material rack to the beds and vice versa the material is of course storage where it's
readily available to throw onto the machine but is also forklift accessible whenever you're
working in quantities of this scale being able to maneuver things with a forklift is invaluable
now moving over here right next to the cnc's is of course where the d tabbing station is it's
going to be the unit that's closest to the machine now we want to try to start getting things away
from the machines which is where the inventory and the packaging up system goes so that's
pretty been pretty much this station here however as things expand which i'm hoping that
they will then we'll probably move that further away from this station where multiple people will
always be working once packaging is done we wheel big carts over to the shipping department where
my mother is working to put a label on it i spent years not having evenings or weekends because
i was just on this mission to create something because at the root of it i am still incredibly
passionate about what it is that i'm doing um but to get to this point in my career to where now i
have a full-fledged team supporting me to where i can not only take things to a different level
but i can also enjoy life at the same time it's just an absolute incredible feeling and if you've
also been supporting me from afar and rooting me on then i can't tell you how much i appreciate it
if you have a high production job that is on your radar that you're looking for a shop then please
consider me and my crew we do work extremely hard and very proud of what we're achieving here so
that's it for this one i really hope that you have found this video entertaining uh informative and
hopefully useful i'll see you on my next one guys way to go team get back to work real quick i want to pause and thank
this video sponsor which is keeps between co-workers friends and families i have a
lot of men in my life and they all have one thing in common they want to keep their hair two out
of three guys will experience some form of male pattern baldness by the time they're 35 and the
best way to prevent hair loss is to do something about it while you have hair left keeps is a
subscription service that makes it easier for men to treat their male pattern baldness a licensed
doctor will review your information online and recommend the right hair loss treatment plan for
you then your treatment is shipped directly to your door every three months keeps is affordable
too as they offer generic versions of fda approved hair loss medications treatments can take
up to four to six months or more to start seeing results so it's important to act fast
the sooner you start the more hair you'll have if you're ready to take action and prevent hair
loss you can go to keeps.com april to get 50 off you
