Wood CNC - Shapeoko 3 XL -Not yet commissioned

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Most of the information below is taken from a direct transcript of a series of videos made by Carbide3D, the manufacturer of the Shapeoko CNC, with some minor alterations to match our particular combination of machine, router and accessories. There are links at the bottom of the page to the original videos and we would recommend you take the time to watch these though the induction quiz is just based on the transcribed text on this page.

Computer Numerical Control is a manufacturing method that automates the control, movement and precision of machine tools through the use of preprogrammed computer software, which is embedded inside the tools. The laser cutter, 3D printers, Metal Mill, PCB mill and vinyl cutter are all examples of CNC machines.

CAD software, Computer Aided Design. This is the entry point to getting your machine to make something. First, design the item in this software, to create the edges and the features of your item. The CAD software also generates the instructions for your machine to follow. These instructions are a series of coordinates and commands which tell the machine where to be, where to go and how fast to move. Our recommendation is you use Carbide Create, this is the CAD software available from Carbide3D as it's designed for beginners and is user friendly. There is a free version and a pro version, all the demonstrations will be shown using the free software that should be able to do most of the kinds of jobs this CNC is designed to do. For the more experienced user Fusion360 can be used with this CNC though it has yet to be tested and there may be slight differences in the workflow.

CAM software, Computer Aided Manufacturing, is the part of the software that moves your machine according to those instructions given to it from the CAD software. It reads out the coordinates and feeds those to the CNC machine. This is the computer and the numeric parts of the machine. A series of coordinates are being fed into the machine on a consistent basis. The software we are using is Carbide Motion and it is already loaded and configured on the Raspberry PI.

The is the language the CNC speaks, this is just a fancy word for the coordinates and commands that the CAM software spits out. This code is generated automatically by the CAD software. You do not need to write any code yourself.

These are the directions or reference for the movement of the machine. X is side to side, Y is backward and forward, Z is up and down. One easy way to remember the directions is that there are 'Y rails' and a 'Z axis' on the machine physically. Therefore, the only thing left is X: side to side.

Vector graphics, such as images saved in a SVG format, consist of lines and nodes, sometimes called points. These lines and nodes define the boundaries of any shape and art that you want to put in the computer. The information in the vector graphic allows the machine to follow the coordinates and create your art.

Tool paths are the paths created by you and the CAD software. You'll define how a tool is used and where it is going to go along a tool path. This is the go between or messenger for the CAD to CAM. Your tool pathing choices are converted into coordinates for the CAM software to spit out to the machine. Coordinates along with the actual tools it needs.

The stock is the material that you put in the machine to be cut.

Feed rate is the rate at which your end mill is being pushed through the material. This is generally in X & Y, so forward and backward, side to side. The Z or the plunge rate is something you also see and that is how fast it is being put into the material in a vertical fashion.

The speed is the spin rate generated by your router. For the Shapeoko you'll adjust this via the dial on top of the router.

These two factors, in concert with your end mill, cut and shape your stock to produce your item. Feeds and speeds can be used generally or quite specifically. The carbide 3D software comes preloaded with all the feeds and speeds you need to begin. This gives you the starting points you need to cut a wide variety of materials with a selection of different end mills.

Cutters, end mills or bits. End mills have a varying number of flutes or cutting and evacuation surfaces. These flutes travel in an upward or downward spiral on the shaft of the cutter.

The Flat End Mill is one that finishes in a completely flat surface designed to give you a flat bottom cut in your stock. These are the workhorses of CNC. 1/4“ and 1/8” flat end mills will get you started on your first projects.

The Ball End Mill finish in a ball whose nose radius is equal to 1/2 the diameter of the tool. This is a fancy way to say that the ball at the end is the same diameter as the end mill. The ball nose is used for a variety of milling and slotting operations. You'll see it frequently in 3D finishing and other finishing passes. It yields a smoother and less abrupt line between machine passes.

V Cutters/Engravers look like upside down triangles. These cutters produce a progressively wider cut as the end mill is pushed deeper into the material. They come in a variety of angles the most common are 90 and 60. In the hobbyist world, these are primarily used for letters and signs using the Vcarve tool pathing. This yields terrific detail with just the point and a totally unique look by utilising multiple depths throughout your texture lettering. Once you know about these cutters, you'll start to see items everywhere which have been created with the V cutter.

Fly Cutters. These are used for face milling material, flattening the waste board of your machine, or flattening the top of your material. Face milling is different than end milling in that you are only cutting with the bottom of the tool and never the side of the tool. Fly cutters can have multiple cutting blades on the bottom surface of the tool, but unlike a traditional end mill, do not contain those flutes, those spiral grooves up the sides of the end mill. Fly cutters contain different numbers of cutting tips, from one on up. Use of a fly cutter typically results in excellent surface finish.

Upcut and Downcut. Coming back to the topic of flutes, upcut or downcut refers to the direction of the flutes, the direction of the flutes creates a few basic effects. First, any chips or debris travelling off the cutter will be forced either upward or downward. Upward will have them automatically removed from the piece you are cutting, whereas downward will force those pieces towards the bottom of your stock. Second, up cut end mills pull at your part as they spin, they will put pulling force on your stock and therefore try and pry loose your material and your work holding better beyond point. Down cut, end mills push downward as they spin. This creates less stress on your stock material, but also keeps chips and debris inside your work area with the potential for the end mill to encounter not only the material being cut, the new material being cut, but also the previously cut chips of that material. This isn't a big deal with wood and most plastics.

There are lots of other specialty end mills that you may come across or choose to experiment with as you progress in CNC But the above will take you 95% of the way to making nearly anything.

2D, 2.5D and 3D machining. These are three types of machining you will hear referenced.

2D and 2.5 are nearly the same thing. 2D refers to the machine running in the X, side to side, and the Y, front to back, directions only. This assumes you are cutting through or dragging along your material at the same depth the entire time. This is very similar to a vinyl cutter where you have the Y running by pulling the vinyl in and out of the machine and your X going across with a knife, and that knife is stable. It's not moving up and down.

2.5D machining indicates that the features of the item are being created at different depths depending upon the feature. Vectors can be used as accent features, not just as cutouts, a pocket inside an item which was later cut out would be indicative of 2.5D machining.

3D tool paths are created off 3D models. Depending upon the software you're using, you'll be able to see the 3D model of your design part, that part and your inputting of tool paths will create situations where the machine is moving in all three axes at once.

• All users must complete an induction prior to using the machine.
• No metal materials, this CNC is just for use with wood and suitable plastics.
• Don't try and bypass the safety interlocks. They are there to protect you and the machine.
• Wear eye protection when the door is open. End mills can shatter if crashed.
• Wear hearing protection and offer hearing protection to others in the room.
• Keep fingers away from moving parts.
• Tidy up afterwards. Vacuum up your dust and wipe down any dirty surfaces.

At the time of writing the latest version of Carbide Create is V7 build 764.

The is just a basic How-To to get you started. There are links at the bottom the the page to a series of videos from Carbide 3D as well as their full written manual. The manual is for a slightly older version but most of the important parts are the same.

When you first open Carbide Create you will be presented with the design screen. This is where you create/import your design before setting up the toolpaths for the machine to cut. The white grid is your workspace and there are several buttons on the left hand side you can use for changing settings or drawing vectors.

Hovering your mouse over any of the buttons brings up a tooltip with a brief description of what it does.

The first step is to enter your stock and machine settings.

Click on the settings icon.

This brings up the 'Job Setup' box.

Enter the width and height of your material(stock). Once applied this will also update the grid on the design screen to match.

Enter the stock thickness, if you are cutting all the way through it then it's very important to get this correct. The 'Zero Height' dropdown has two options, Top or Bottom. This corresponds to where you set the zero point on the machine (more on this later). The default is Top.

The Toolpath Zero drop down allows you to select where in relation to your design you are going to set the zero point on the machine. This might sound complicated but it should become clear when we cover setting the workspace zero point on the machine. The default is Lower-Left.

Under the 'Job' section select the material type you are working with, please note that even though Aluminium is an option metal is not permitted to be cut on this machine. Machine should be set to Shapeoko 3. Retract Height is the height the cutting bit will lift up above the stock when moving from one position to another, the default of 5mm is normally fine. The 'Units' dropdown allows you to change between millimetres and inches for your measurements and grid layout.

Once you have finished click 'Ok'. You should see that the white grid has changed to match the stock dimensions you entered.

Now you can use the 'Crete Vector' buttons to make basic designs.

For this example we are going to draw a square 150mm X 150mm which will be the outer line of our design.

Click on the create rectangle tool, click once on the grid to select the centre of the rectangle then move your cursor to set the size of the rectangle and click again to finish. You don't have to worry about getting the square the correct size or in the correct place when drawing it as these can be easily changed later.

With the rectangle drawn and selected you will then see more options in the toolbar on the left.

In the 'Parameters' section you can specify the physical size as well as specific parameters for a particular shape, like the corner style and radius for a rectangle.

The 'Transform' section has several tools to like move, scale, rotate and mirror. I want the square to be positioned in the lower corner but spaced away from the edge slightly. Selecting the 'Move' option gives me the following parameters.

The Anchor point selection allows you to choose what point on the shape to use for the measurements. The Position shows the location of the selected point in relation to the bottom left corner. X is how far the shape is away left to right and Y is the distance bottom to top. By selecting the anchor point in the lower left and specifying 10mm in both the X and Y boxes the square is moved 10mm away from both the lower and left edge of my stock.

For the sake of simplicity I will not be covering any of the other 'Transform' tools, watch the video tutorials or read the manual if you want to know more about these options.

In the 'Edit' section there are some more tools, the only one we will cover now is the Edit Tabs option.

If you are cutting a part out from a larger piece of stock that it clamped in place it is important that your part doesn't become separated from the rest of your stock. If I were just to cut out that 150x150mm square entirely it would become loose inside the machine possible moving and jamming the bit. This could result in the bit breaking and/or the workpiece being catapulted into the air.

The easiest way to ensure a part you want to fully cut out doesn't become loose is to tell the machine to leave it attached by a few small tabs. These tabs can then be manually cut and sanded flat once the CNC job is complete. There are other ways of clamping that mitigate this issue, like double sided tape, but this How-To is assuming you are using the supplied clamping kit.

Selecting the 'Edit Tabs' option will allow you to click anywhere along a vector line to place a tab. You can also click the 'Clear all tabs' button to delete all the tabs. I will click roughly on the midpoint of each line of the square to add a tab, we will specify the physical sizes in a later step.

Tabs added to the square.

On the main design screen, just below the Create Vector section is the Import section.

As the title suggest, this allows you to import designs. The 'Import' button allows you to import vector files, like SVG's from your computer. The 'Trace Image' allows you to import an image file and trace around its outline to convert it into a vector file. The 'Library' button opens the built in Design Library that has a selection of basic shapes and more complicated designs. Double click a design in the library to import it.

For this design I am going to import the Hackspace logo the adjust its size and position to centre it within the square. Select 'Import' and navigate to the file location on your PC. The vector drawing will then immediately be imported into your design space.

Something to note is because this file contains two vector drawings and both are selected another section becomes visible in the left hand tool bar.

The Boolean section has tools to combine separate vector drawings whilst doing things like cutting one shape from another or only keeping parts that overlay. Please refer to the manual for more details.

For this particular design I want the cog outline but not the big H inside it, so I will click on an empty space to deselect the two vectors then click on the H to select just the H and hit Delete on my keyboard to delete it.

I can now click on the cog outline to select it and use the 'Transform' tools to move it and resize it. I will select 'Scale' and resize it to 140mm X 140mm.

To align it with the square I could use the move tool and work out the position relative to the stock bottom left corner but the easier way is to use the align tool.

This can work in a couple of ways. If one vector is selected then it can align it to the stock, if two vectors are selected you can align one vector with another. The last vector to be selected is the vector that the other are aligned to. In our case we want to align the cog with the square so I will select the cog first and the square last.

Click on the cog first then hold the Shift key and click on the square so both are now selected.

Click on the Align tool button and the 'Align / Space' tool bar will show.

The 'Align Reference' has defaulted to Last Selection automatically because we have more than one vector selected. The cog should have a solid line and the square should have a dotted line showing that the cog will be moved to align with the square.

We want to align the centres so we are going to select the middle button in the 'Align Centres' section to align the cog in the centre of the square in both the X (side to side) and Y (top to bottom) axis.

The cog is not aligned with the outer square.

The last thing we are going to do it add some text inside the cog. In the 'Create Vector' section in the tool bar we are going to click the 'Create Text' tool.

This opens the Create Test toolbar and adds the text to the centre of your design space.

You can then use the tools on the left to input the text you want, select font size and spacing, change the alignment of the text change it from straight text to arcing text. For my design I am going to use the parameters below.

I can then use the same steps from above to align the test with the centre of the cog or square.

For this How-To the design is not complete. The next step is to generate the toolpaths for the machine.

Don't forget to save your work by clicking on File - Save.

Now we have our completed design the next step is to create the tool paths so the machine knows what we are milling out and with what tools.

Select the 'Toolpaths' tab in the left hand toolbar.

There are a number of different 2D toolpaths available, for our design we will be using the Contour, Pocket and VCarve toolpaths.

To cut our design out we first need to pocket out the cog shape, carve the text into the bottom of the pocket then finally cut around the outside of our design. You should create your toolpaths in the same order you plan to run the actually cutting jobs on the machine.

SO our first step is to pocket out the cog shape. Click on the cog vector line so it is selected. Click on 'Pocket' in the Toolpaths section of the toolbar. You will get a popup asking you to confirm if you want to use the currently selected item. Click 'Use Current Selection'.

You will now see the Pocket toolpath parameters.

The first step is to select the tool/bit you are using. Carbide Create has a tool library where each bit is already configured with the recommended Speeds & Feeds for that particular bit used with a particular material type. The Hackspace provides a small selection of bits that are equivalent to the some of the bits in the tool library. We recommend you stick to using this bits until you are more confident with using the machine.

I want to perform the pocket with a 1/8“ ball nose endmill to give the edge of the pocket a rounder shape and give the bottom of teh pocket an interesting texture.

To select your tool click on the 'Edit' button in the 'Tool' section in the left hand toolbar. This will bring up the 'Edit Tool' pop-up.

In this window you can override some of the default setting for the tool, we are going to use all the default settings for our design.

The top section allows you to change the selected tool by clicking the the 'Select Tool' button. This brings up the Tool Library.

The tools are separated into different categories based on the material you will be cutting. Again please note that even though there is a Aluminium category cutting metal on this CNC is not permitted.

The tool I want to use is the 1/4 Ball Endmill which had the equivalent tool number #202. My material is a hardwood so I will navigate to the 'Carbide 3D-Shapeoko-Hardwood' - 'Ball Mills' - '#202 Ball Mill (1/4”)', as shown in the image above, and click on OK. This takes us back to the 'Edit Tool' window where we can click 'OK' to finish selecting the tool.

The next selection down in the 'Pocket Toolpath' tool bar is 'Vectors'. We don not need to make any changes here as we already selected the vectors we want to pocket out.

The next section down is the 'Cutting Depth' section. Here we can set the start and max depth of the pocket. If you recall further up when we configured our stock we set the Zero Height to the top of our stock. This means that the Start Depth for this pocket will be at 0 mm, which is the top of out stock. I want the pocket to be a depth of 10 mm so will set the Max Depth to 10 mm.

The final option is the 'Name' section. Give the toolpath a descriptive name, I'm going to call this toolpath 'Cog pocket', so you can easily identify it later.

Once you are happy with your chosen parameters click 'OK' and you will be taken back to the Toolpath screen. You will then see your newly created toolpath listed in the box in the toolbar, including an estimation of how long this particular job will take to complete, as well as seeing a representation of the toolpath showing the path the cutting bit will take.

The next step is the text VCarve. Like before we are going to select the vector we want to work with, the text “Hack” in this instance, then click the VCarve button in the Toolpaths section of the tool bar. As before we need to confirm that we have selected the vectors we want to work with by clicking on @Use Current Selection' when the popup opens up. This will open up the VCarve Toolpath parameters that look fairly identical to the Pocket parameters.

Like before we can click on 'Edit' in the 'Tool' section of the tool bar to select the required tool and material. In this case 'Carbide 3D-Shapeoko-Hardwood' - 'Vee' - '#302 Vee(60,0degrees)'.

We now need to make a change to the cutting depth. As we are VCarving on the bottom of a pocket cut-out we need to change the start depth to the same depth that we cut the pocket to. SO in this instance out start depth needs to be 10mm. We then need to change the Max Depth. The way VCarving works in Carbide Create is that regardless of what the Max Depth is set to the V bit will only go as deep as it needs to carve out the width of the text. The one cavate to this is if Max Depth is set to is set to a shallower depth the bit will only cut to the set shallower depth. For this design I will set the Max Depth to 15mm meaning the tip of the V bit will either cut to 5mm depth or until the width of the V bit fills the width of the text, whichever comes first.

As before, give it a suitable name and then click OK. This job should now appear under the 'Cog Pocket' job we previously setup and you should also see the preview lines within the text showing where the bit will cut.

The final step is to use the 'Contour' Tool path to cut the outline out of the stock.

As before select the vector we want to work with, the outer square, and click on the 'Contour' button in the Toolpath section of the toolbar and confirm the selection.

The Contour Toolpath parameters are very similar to what we have already seen but with a couple more options.

In the tool section we are going to click Edit then Select Tool and select the tool #102 End Mill (1/8“) from the same Hardwood section we have used before.

In the Cutting Depth section we are going to set out starting depth to 0mm, which if you recall is the top of our stock, and set the Max Depth to cut all the way through our stock. You can enter the depth manually or click on 'Use Stock Bottom' which will automatically set the Max Depth to the stock thickness you configured right at the beginning.

In Toolpath Setting there is a dropdown that allow you to choose an offset, either 'Outside / Right', 'Inside / Left' or 'No Offset'. This allows you to cut up to the edge of the square cut down centred to the line. For our design we want to select 'Outside / Right'. When you change this you should notice the preview line showing the path of the tool will change so it goes around the outside of our square.

The next section down is 'Tabs'. If you recall back to when we drew the outer square we added some tabs midway along each edge. This is where we configure the width and height of the tabs. Smaller tabs leave less clean-up but add a slight risk of them breaking before the cut is completed. The default measurements of 12mm width and 3mm height are a good starting point and there is no real need to change them unless your design calls for it.

Lastly, give the toolpath a suitable name and click OK.

The toolbar should now list the three job we have configured as shown below.

Below the list is the 'Simulation' section. This allows you to generate a simulation of what you stock will look like after the jobs are completed. The drop down allows you to change the material that is rendered in the simulation, changing this has no effect on any of the jobs. The checkboxes allows you to enable and disable some of the information shown in the simulation.

Clicking on 'Show Simulation' should bring up a render similar to the one below, I selected Beech for the render.

You can use the left mouse button to rotate the view and the right mouse button to drag the view. If you rotate it you will be able to see the toolpath preview showing the pocket and contour being cut with several passes at slightly different depths.

To get a better view of what your part will look like you can use the checkboxes on the 'Simulation' section of the toolbar to turn off the lines representing the toolpaths and rapid movements, this should leave you with a similar render to the one below, if you look closely around the edge you can also see the tabs, there is also one along the top and bottom you cant see due to the angle.

We are now finished designing out part and configuring all the toolpaths.

Below the Simulation section there is the 'Save Toolpaths' button. Click on this and when the pop-up comes up make sure 'Save toolpaths in this file' is selected, and click OK.

You can now transfer your design file, that now also includes the toolpaths, onto a USB stick and head over to the machine.

https://my.carbide3d.com/#Design_with_Carbide_Create

Video tutorials. Cut Rocket YouTube