V-Carving Artwork & Letters with a CNC Router

One of the projects that's really cool to do on a CNC is this kinda relief carving, relief cutting, where when we're all done, the letters and objects are standing proud of the background. This is the kind of thing I'm gonna show you how to do on this CNC. We're gonna go through the programming, how to set this up. Also, how to create a perfect octagon like this. And then once we're there, we'll look at getting it on the machine and everything else we need to do in order to make this cut.

Here's a list of everything that you're gonna learn on this video. We're ready to run VCarve and work on the sign that we're gonna create. So we've got a couple of things go in here. We're gonna create a new file. We're gonna get our material dimensions in there.

So starting with a blank slate here. Step one is to come over here to our menu on the left and create a new file. When we do that, we get this menu and it wants to know how large is the material that we're gonna work with. So we need to know the size of the blank that's gonna go into the CNC machine. So we're gonna use a piece that's 14 inches wide.

That's our X axis. And 14 inches high, that's the Y axis. Now even more critical, I think is the thickness of the material here. Now, remember that when we make our piece we are gonna cut all the way through. So we have to know how thick our material is so that when we tell it to cut through it's gonna go through, but not miles through.

So we wanna measure thickness pretty finitely 'cause we're working with MDF here. That's easy in this case because MDF runs a pretty darn consistent three 3/4 of an inch. So that's 0.75. The other thing that the software wants to know at this point is where are we gonna originate our file? So when we look at our finished board we could have our XY zero point down here at a corner.

We could have it in the center. We could have it up at this corner. And that's just an, it depends of how you're working with your piece, how you're gonna position it on the machine itself. For this project, we're gonna make zero X, zero Y right smack in the middle. So when I come here, I'm currently set for the center.

If I click there, that puts my zero, zero in the lower left corner. So like I said, we wanna stay on the center. If we needed to, we can change from inches to millimeters. Lot of options with the software and we're gonna go over some of them, but not all of them because we just wanna get you to a point where you can start setting some of this work up on your machine. In our case now we've got our material on here.

Here's our 14 by 14 inch board. Here at the center, that zero, zero. So we're ready to start laying out our project. And what we wanna do is put an octagon on here. Now we could grab a line tool and start drawing lines, but that's like me trying to draw a perfect octagon with a pencil.

So instead let's take advantage of what the machine is capable of and simply draw a polygon. When I come to that polygon menu I can choose the number of sides I want. I'm gonna pick eight 'cause we want an octagon. Then when I come to the next line, center point, where do we want this pivot point to be? And I'm gonna put it at zero X, zero Y that's the center of our board.

Then the radius is, if we drew a circle, it circumscribes the octagon. How big would that circle be? Let's try it. Let's go just a little bit bigger than that. Let's try five and we'll see what we get over here.

So when I hit create that's our octagon. Now we could go just a little bit bigger than that. Let's undo. 'cause let's fill our workspace as long as we're doing this. We have a 14 by 14 inch board.

So let's go with a six inch radius. That gives us our 12 inch octagon. Now, what we've got here is the outside of our piece. This line is describing the outside of the octagon. And if we look at our finished piece, what we need to do is have our outside, but we also need to have an inside, the router bits gonna need to know where to stop when we create this ledge right here.

So one way we could do that would be to click Control C. That's gonna copy, doing that on the keyboard. Control V on a PC, that's the paste function. And then that gives me a second octagon. Now the problem with this is I'm manually controlling then the size of that second one.

So the point of this is does this work to produce a second octagon? Yes, is it the easiest way to make this happen? No, so I'm gonna delete the one I just resized. Come to this one and let's take advantage of what the computer offers and come over here to the menu, to this offset option. And I can offset and the menu gives me the opportunity to go outwards.

I can make an octagon that's bigger. Inwards, make an octagon that's smaller or both and indicate just how much I want that offset to be. So let's call that 3/8 of an inch. And then this is pretty cool. When I hit offset, it automatically creates an octagon that's a perfect 3/8 of an inch smaller than the first one.

And we can use that, not just with octagons, of course but with any shape that we're trying to create, we can take advantage of that offset. Now, part of what we wanna look at here is if we go out to the worldwide inter web and we bring in clip art, can we cut that clip art here on the CNC? And the answer is yes. So for our work today, I found a handsaw and this is the saw that we wanna use. Now, the problem is that this is a JPEG or some kind of a file like that, which means it's not a file that the CNC software necessarily recognizes.

So if we have this sitting in the middle of our stop sign and we start cutting the router bit is not gonna know that this is the perimeter of our saw. So we've got to fix that. What we're gonna do we have to make this artwork what's called vectors. And it's pretty darn easy to do. What I can do is pick this, I can select this.

Then when I come over here to my menu on the left there's an option here to trace the bitmap. Don't worry about the tracing part. It's much easier than it sounds. I'm gonna click that. I'm gonna use that function.

And then we get a menu here. And what this is allowing us to do is the software is gonna look at the lines on the clip art and turn them into vectors that the cutting program actually recognizes. So I can change different parameters. I can make it more sensitive, less sensitive. I can bring in color.

I can bring in black and white. Let's do a preview and see with the settings just the way they are. What do we get. So when I clicked on preview and these lines turned dark those are the lines that are now gonna become vectors for the computer to cut. And that looks like it came out okay.

So now we'll click apply. Now let me close. And what happens now, if you watch, when I click on the saw when I click out here, that's the outside of the saw, then it's, there's one of the rivet holes. There's one of the rivet holes. There's the handle, the hole in the handle.

And what I'd like to do. I don't wanna have all these individual components. I want it to see the saw as a saw. I want it to all be grouped together. So I'm selecting all of that and we can do that by dragging around it.

Oops, I missed part of it. Here we go. Creating that rectangle around it, just using the cursor. It's all pink now. When I come over to the menu on the left side there's a group option, group selected objects.

So when I click on that now it's made all of those vectors a group. And when I move them, they're all moving together. Now a good question would be, well, what's this gray thing hanging out here? That's our original image. And we don't need that anymore.

So this one that I was moving, those are our vectors. That's what we want. This one that was left behind, that's the original image. I'm just gonna hit the delete key on the keyboard and make that go away. So this now turned into artwork that the computer is gonna recognize when we start to do our cuts.

Let's take a closer look at this 'cause we can do some, make some changes to it here. I'm scrolling in on my mouse. I'm rolling the wheel to magnify that. And I know that there's some detail here that we're not gonna need. This inner line here is gonna be superfluous for what we're cutting.

So what I'm gonna do is click all of this, turn it pink again. Now I can't eliminate just that inner line because everything is grouped together. No matter where I click, I get the entire handsaw but there's stuff there I wanna get rid of. So I'm gonna get the whole handsaw by clicking on it. Then I'm gonna come back to my menu and I'm gonna ungroup it.

So then it's gonna see those now as individual components, there's the inner line. There's only the outer line. So that inner line I'm simply gonna delete and let that go away. We're doubled up on lines here on our rivets. We don't need all those lines.

I'm gonna hit the inner ones and go away now. How do I know that we're not gonna need this stuff? Well, part of it is I worked with this artwork once before. So I went through some experimentation to see what would work and what wouldn't work. And part of it is how small a space we would create.

So I got to be able to fit a router bit into this hole when I go to cut it. So with that inner circle I had in here it's smaller than what we need in order to make that internal cut with our router bit, Over here on the handle we've got two lines in the original art. I'm gonna eliminate the inner one. And that gives us cleaner lines now, cleaner objects for the software to handle. Now let's zoom out by rolling the wheel on the mouse and I'm gonna come back and get all the saw highlighted again.

Make a big rectangle. There we go. And now because I had ungrouped it these are all individual components. Let's come back and group them again. That way when I click on the saw, I can move it anywhere I want it.

Whoops. And it'll move as a unit instead of just grabbing individual parts. Now, the other thing that's pretty cool is we can come up here to a corner. We can make the saw littler. We can make the saw bigger by dragging.

We can also come up here on a corner. If I get in just the right spot there and we can pivot it. So we can manipulate the artwork once it's in to get it where we want it, the size we want it, we can make a do what we want it to do because of the angles on the side here, in this case, I like for the saw to also be at an angle like that. I think that's kind of cool. All right, so let's add some text to what we're doing here.

And one of the things we can do is we can use the software to create parameters to help guide our layout. I'm gonna come over here to the left side and I'm gonna get this rectangle tool. And in this case, I'm not gonna lay it out on the menu. I'm gonna lay it out manually 'cause what I know is I would like my letters to fit in about that much space. So I'm messing with it a little bit here just to get it the size that I want it.

And this is just a temporary device. This is, this rectangle is just for layout to help me get texts that will fit in this part of my sign. So I'm gonna highlight that, the layout rectangle and come back to my menu on the left for a text tool. Now there's two of them. There's draw text and there's draw text within a vector box.

Which one do you think I should use? Well, let's go inside the vector box 'cause I have a vector box. So that's gonna control the size of the text. Now my sign says George's shop and I've already got one of those. So we're gonna do Sam shop.

Type Sam, enter to get on the next line. Shop. And down here, there's about 80 bazillion options that we can use for different types of texts when we lay this out. So you can experiment with this, you can change the layout. You can change the text, we can align it to the left.

We can align it to the center. We can align it to the right, a lot of different options. I'm gonna go with center alignment and we're gonna stick with the Garamond text that we're using now and apply. And then see, it's pretty cool 'cause I've already got that rectangle there. It fits the text into that rectangle.

If I didn't have the rectangle there it might just plant the text huge on there, not a huge deal. And I'll show you why, because let's say that happened. There's my text. If it's too small, I can make it bigger. If it's too big, I can make it smaller.

I can move it if I wanna move it. So there are after the fact options but describing the area, defining the area with that rectangle just helps you focus in a little bit on getting it right on the first try. Rectangle was just a layout device. So let's get rid of that. And now that I look at this, I think the text could be a little bit bigger 'cause Sam's got bad eyes.

We wanna make it easy for him to read. And I'm just manually repositioning it to get it to where it looks nice in our drawing. Our layout is complete. Now we're ready to do some cutting. Now this is pretty cool.

This is, these letters are cut such that the background is relieved and that leaves the saw and the letters standing proud. So let's do that step first. What we have to do is tell the software where to stop. Where does the carving originate? Where does it end?

So we're gonna do that by clicking the inner octagon. That's our border out here where we want the relieving to stop. Now, as I click another area, I wanna keep the letters too. I don't want it to just blast through those. If I just click the letters, it unclicked the outline.

So the key to that is holding the shift key. Click the outline, that's parameter number one or borderline number one. Hold the shift key. Click the letters because those all went in together. They all highlight at the same time.

And then we wanna keep the saw. So I'm gonna click this outline line of the saw. That's the stuff that's gonna get left behind when we do our VCarve. Next we're ready for tool paths. When you open up this tool path menu, it's nice to hit this little pin at the top and that holds it open.

If I don't pin it, then every time I come off of there that tool path menu wants to close again and it's just a little cumbersome. If I pin it in an open position, it's gonna remain open while we do this programming. So let's come back. Pink boarder, shift key. Pink letters, pink saw.

And the function we're gonna use is this one. We're gonna VCarve. Now a couple of things going on here. We need to pick cutters. For the V bit here that's the cutter that we're choosing to use that's gonna finish the cut.

That's the cutter that will be right up against these edges and create that nice crisp corner. I find that a 60 degree cutter works pretty well for that. But if we look at our menu when we select bits, we can use a variety of different V bits in order to make that work. But the steepness of a 63 degree cutter works great for leaving good detail by. Oops.

'cause I didn't hit a bit when I was in here. 60 degree, 1/2 inch diameter. There we go. Now think about what's gonna happen here. Your routing experience may have told you that if all I do is come in here with a 60 degree V bit and I got to take all this wood out of here it's gonna take a lifetime and it's a pointy bit, not a flat bottom bit.

So what can we do to get material removed more quickly and leave a flatter surface behind than a pointy bit is gonna leave? Well, that's the option here. Use flat area clearance tool. So if I click this what's gonna happen is it allows me to choose a tool that will excavate out most of the waste. It'll get as close as it can to the letters without, and the saw and the boarder, without messing them up.

So when we select our cutter, this is a function of, if I go with a real small bit it'll get in closer to the details, but it'll take longer. If I go to a real large bit, it'll go faster but it won't get as close to the details. I'm gonna go with a 3/8 inch bit calling this an end mill. This is what we're used to using in our shop. Just basically straight carbide or fluted or spiral fluted router bits.

So a 3/8 spiral bit is what's gonna make that cut. And then what we need to do is tell it how deeply do we want that to go. This is this number right here, flat depth. If we increase the number, then it's gonna create a deeper, deeper, deeper profile. If we decrease it, it's gonna back it off.

0.13, that's just a little over 1/8 of an inch. Let's leave it there. And I think that's gonna work well for us. As we come down here then with these file names I like to make them descriptive for what we're doing. That's gonna help me know which bit to put in.

So I'm gonna call this 60 degree VCarve. And then we're gonna hit this calculate button and you're gonna see a bunch of lines appear. And that's laying out the cut that we just created. Now, those lines don't really tell me much. It tells me the tool path but that's visually not very helpful to me.

So let's come back over here on the right side and preview the tool paths. And this is really cool. We're gonna do a virtual cut on the computer. That's our 3/8 bit followed by the V bit. Now we've got a little bit of kerflooeynewness here because it excavated out this handle area.

So let's go back and look at why that happened. I don't wanna, I don't wanna VCarve this. We're gonna treat that a little bit differently later. So I'm happy with the letters. I'm happy with the border.

I'm not happy with this. So when we come back and look. So the problem here is, remember I grouped our handsaw components so that I could easily move it. So when I clicked on this and that highlighted this it turned everything pink. And what I really wanna do is only turn the outside of this pink.

So easy fix. We're gonna come back here. I'm gonna select the handsaw. I'm gonna ungroup my objects again. So now when I pick the outside, I only get the outside.

And then we're gonna pick our letters. And then we're gonna pick our border. And I'm gonna come back here and I'm just gonna delete and delete. So we're gonna get rid of that stuff that was incorrect. Come back here and get my outside of my saw, saw, border, letters.

Now these parameters, I said initially are still there 'cause we just used them. So all I need to do is give this a name. Calculate. Now we're still looking at the preview that was incorrect. So I'm gonna reset that and I'm gonna make all that go away.

Preview the tool path we have now. That's what we want, that's better. Except that we got the V cut, not the pocketing cut. So by clicking on pocket cut that's the 3/8 bit. We'll preview that one.

So that happened because. There we go. So that happened because I did preview selected tool path instead of preview all tool paths. Now we can rotate this and that's gonna let us look at it cross ways and see there's the depth of our letters. That's that 0.13 that we programmed into this.

So is that enough? Do we wanna make a deeper, do we wanna make a shallower? We could go back and redo all of that. Now let's come back here. We wanna cut this out from our mothership.

We wanna cut it out from the main board. So I pick the outside. And on our tool paths we're gonna use this one. We're gonna use what's called a profile tool path. And when I do this, this router bit is gonna somehow follow this line.

Somehow is defined by this. It can cut on the outside, it can cut on the inside. It can cut on the line. On the line would be the bit is centered on the line. We don't wanna do that 'cause it would cut into part of our shoulder, we're trying to leave behind.

We don't wanna cut on the inside. We wanna cut on the outside. Up here at the top we need to tell it how deeply to go. We want it to cut through, but on a 3/4 inch board, 1.3 inches would be too much. So 0.77.

Remember our thickness was 0.75. That's gonna let us cut through but now think about what's gonna happen here. If I simply cut through then on the last pass our sign is gonna come loose of the field of the rest of the board. So we're gonna use what are called tabs to secure everything in place. This will make more sense in just a second.

I'm gonna add tabs. I'm gonna edit my tabs and I get options up here. Let's go ahead and add and we'll see how that looks. So here's what happened. These yellow dots are tiny bits of material that are left between our project piece and the main board securing them together.

After all the work is done and we can see it on this one. After all the work is done we can come back and cut those tabs out, sand or flush trim back to our work and they're just gonna simply go away but it holds everything together until we're ready to take it apart. This is a lot of tabs we have on here. So I am gonna increase the distance between the tabs just 'cause we don't need that many. That looks better.

Now let's say that turned out by our layout that it left you with a tab right on that corner. It might be a little bit awkward to deal with because it's right on an outside corner. So at this stage we can manually grab those and push the tabs to wherever we want them. Here's one on the corner, down here to make it work better. So you still as a woodworker got to give this some intuition.

You've still got to it some control to make sure it's gonna go the way you want it to go. Close. Now let's choose our cutter. We're gonna do this with a 3/8 bit. And there's some economy of movement.

Remember we're doing our clearance on the inside with a 3/8 cutter. So if we use a 3/8 bit for this it saves us a bit change. So let's have our, look at our work here. We're gonna cut through 0.77, 3/8 bit. How many passes it gonna take to go through that MDF, it's set for seven.

We can look at that and say, "Well, how does that look?" Seven passes on a 3/4 inch board. We're cutting 0.11 per pass. That's less than 1/8 of an inch. I think we can go a little bit more aggressively. Let's reduce to six passes cutting about 1/8 of an inch per pass.

Let's go down one more. MDF machines pretty well. So we can do this in fewer passes and it's still gonna come out okay. We've got our tabs. We've got our cut through.

I'm gonna change the name here. So I know what bit to use. 0.375. And I'm gonna call it EXT for exterior. Now this is a cool feature.

It gives us a warning. You've set this to cut through, do you know that? So if that was a problem, we'd go back and fix something. But in our case, we wanna cut through. So this is a good thing.

The blue line is our tool path. Let's preview that tool path, see if that looks like it's okay. There it is. The blue is where it's cut through, the tabs are where it's left material behind. Let's add some detail to that saw and we'll be done with this.

I'm gonna work my rivets. Holding the shift key now so I get them all selected. And the handle hole. We're gonna do what's called a pocket cut. That's this option here where it says pocket.

So what this is gonna do is create a little recess where those items are. Let's check our work here. 1.125, that'd be way too deep. We'd cut away through our material. Let's go 1/8 of an inch deep.

This cutter is gonna be too big to fit in those small areas. Let's go down to 1/8 of an inch bit. And we'll be able to tell, if either, if even 1/8 of an inch is too small we're gonna know that in just a second. And then the rest of this work is gonna be just fine. Let's rename our file.

0.125, and that's some detail work that we're doing. Calculate. Now check our work. Is it really doing what we want it to do? Are we getting the details?

Let's preview that tool path. So here, are we getting holes? Yes we are. Are we getting a handle hole? Yes we are.

So in other words if the cutter was too big, these holes wouldn't exist. It wouldn't have been able to cut them. So we could go back and make a change. Now let's go back and give this another detail. We wanna create the detail for this line.

We wanna give that a little bit of definition. So we're gonna click that. We're gonna use this engraving option and we wanna be on the outline. We don't wanna cut all of it away. We just wanna cut the line.

We're gonna do this with a very sharp and pointed cutter. We're gonna do it with a 30 degree bit, comes to a really really sharp and distinct V. Let's try that. And identify it here in our file name. 30 degree and this is a handle shape.

So there's our tool path has been created. Let's come back to our view and see when we do that 30 degree handle, preview our tool path, there it is. It creates that line just around the outside of our handle to give it some definition. So that's all set. So next thing let's save our work so we can get it out to the CNC itself.

Click. This little thing that looks like an old fashioned floppy disk is our save function. Now one of the things we need to do is choose the correct post processor for what we're doing and in your shop once we've, once you're using that, it's gonna default to that all the time. We're gonna go out and run this on the Laguna. So I've got the Laguna post processor.

I'm gonna save my tool path. I'm gonna put it on that flash drive so we can then put it into the FAB on the Laguna. I like to create a folder that identifies the project and then put the individual files inside that folder. So there's our 60 degree letters. That's the pocket cut.

Now this says 60 degree letters again, but remember that runs twice. It does a clearing cut with a 3/8 bit and then it does the detail cut with the 60 degree cutter. So all I'm doing is one by one. I'm clicking the file, save the tool path. They're all into the same spot.

Now to make things a little easier when we get to our work, I'm gonna open that file up. 60 degree pocket. What is that really? That's our 3/8 inch clearance cut. So on this one file, I'm just gonna call that then 0.375.

And this is 375 degree letters. That's gonna remind me that it's for the lettering cut. So that's gonna let me know once we start running that I need to be running the 3/8 bits there. This file can be saved so you can run it again or you can save it and change it a little bit. Put somebody else's name in there so we can keep reworking that file if we want.

Our flash drive is ready and we're ready to head to the CNC. Before we can run the CNC here one of the things we got to do is secure our work to the table. So we're gonna take advantage of the T-track system that's in this one. And using these clamps, get everything secured down. Now keep in mind board size, project size.

The board was 14 by 14. Our octagon was smaller than that. Of course, where I'm going with this is you gotta make sure when you're using fasteners like this they're well out of the way of your tool path then these are gonna be just fine. Now, again, it works to hold it down only on the outside because we're tabbing the object so it's not gonna be cut completely free. One of the things I've done is I've already put in 3/8 router bit and you're gonna see bit changes get made in just a little bit.

But I've got a 3/8 router bit installed. And the next thing we need to do is get it in just the right X, Y zero. Remember we define that as the center of our project. I've got a couple of pencil lines on my board and we also need to get the Z axis, the vertical access zero. All right, here we go.

What I'm gonna do is start out by getting the bit a little bit closer to the work. That's our Z axis here, so I can bring the Z down. And that's just gonna make it easier to tell what I'm actually over that origin, over my zero, zero point. And then with our Y's and X's we can move the head. So that's gonna let us jog it until we're over our center point.

Now in this case we've got quite a bit of waste wood surrounding our project. So if we're plus or minus 1/16 or 1/8 of an inch, it's probably not a huge deal. That looks pretty good for positioning. Now I can hit X, Y, zero. And that tells the machine that that's the zero, zero point in the X and Y we haven't done the Z yet but that's a zero point now for my X and Y.

Now for my Z, I'm gonna raise this up. I need a little clearance. And we're gonna use what's called a touch plate, touch pad. So this is gonna go under our cutter and then it plugs into the machine itself. So what happens is the machine knows just how thick this is.

It's gonna recognize the closing of a circuit when the bit touches here, so that it's gonna tell the machine when it's zeroed in the Z axis. So touch plate goes under. Then we'll come back to the FAB and I'm gonna hit two buttons at the same time here. It's gonna find that plate. Now, the reason that a Z doesn't read zeros is because our cutter is now above the workpiece by this amount.

So as it comes down and it's in, there at the surface of the workpiece that Z would zero out. That takes care of our setup. Next thing we're ready to actually start running our work. So we've got to bring the flash drive out that we saved on. And then we're gonna run.

And it's looking for the flash drive. That's our UDisk there, USB. So that's okay. Now we have different files on the flash drive. The one that we created for this project was shop sign.

And when we go in there, this is a listing of all the files that are available in the shop site. And I remember how I said, I like to name the files with the cutter so that when I get here, I know what I'm doing. This is why, 375. Well, that tells me I need to have a 3/8 bid in there in order to run this one. A 60 degree bit to run that one.

So that helps me just keep track of what I should be doing. I'm gonna close the dust collection door then we're gonna be ready to start running this. We've got the correct file highlighted. That's our 3/8 bit. Hit okay.

And then okay again. It's gonna go through a little countdown. Get our dust collection running and we're cutting wood. We're all set with that first pass. Now let's talk about something here.

We're gonna come in and because the 3/8 bit is already in there and it's zeroed out and it's Z, we're gonna go ahead and run the other 3/8 file right away now. Now when we output these, when we exported them to the flash drive, we could have run these together, we could have exported them together and they would have automatically run back to back and that's just fine. That would have saved us stopping at this step and calling up the next file. Here we go. Now it's gonna cut the perimeter with those tabs.

That takes care of our two cuts that are done with a 3/8 bit. So let's come back here. I'm just gonna make my bit change a little bit easier by bringing the head to me. And the 3/8 bit is gonna come out and we'll do our V bit next. The VCarve cutter that's at 60 degree bit.

So when it comes to changing cutters, this is very much like dealing with a conventional router collet. We're gonna lock up the shaft. Loosen the collet nut. Now, in this case, we're going from 1/2 inch shank to 1/4 inch shank. So pop the collet.

New collet goes in. And then the only other thing we've got to keep in mind is we've changed bits. So we've lost our Z zero. Our X and Y zero are still just fine. Yup, we have the technology to take care of that.

There we go, it's gonna hit that touch plate. Give us our Z zero and then we're good to go. Oh, this is gonna be second verse same as the first. I'm gonna run. I'm gonna get to that file.

I'm gonna get to the V bit. There it is. 60 degree, we'll call that one up. Okay, okay. Ready to run.

VCarve is done. I think this stuff is so cool because of the way that the program allows it to calm down kind of ramp into the cut and really incise, really cut those inside corners really looks like it's been hand-carved. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna change to the 1/8 inch bit. This is stuff you've already seen.

This one will come out, the 1/8 inch bit which is also 1/4 in shank will go in. I'm gonna re-zero my Z. Then we'll take off and do the cuts that the 1/8 inch bit does. Then we'll come back and do the 30 degree bit change and that's gonna wrap this up. So a bit change here and we'll be back and running again.

We have one more cutter change and then we're gonna be done with this but I wanna show you this one. This is pretty cool. Here's our 30 degree bit, very, very pointed tip. It's really gonna let you engrave a very fine detail. And interestingly, it's an 1/8 inch shank router bit.

So we're gonna change our collets again in order to run this. This part you've already seen, we're gonna change collets, change bits, zero our Z and then we'll run our last piece of software. Can I call up our 30 degree bit? There it is. It's already zeroed out.

Ready to go. All right, let's have a look at what we've done. There's our finished shine. So pretty cool. Clip art off the web.

Brought in. Did that bitmap to change it into vectors that the software will recognize. But not only did we cut that saw, but look right there across the bottom there's actually the teeth of the saw that were cut in by our V bit. We've got our handle details. Now here's what had happened next for me, I would take this to a bandsaw and I would cut through those tabs, leaving them proud of the edge.

Then from there, you can either use a flush trim router bit to trim the tabs completely off or you could send them off. Now, this is MDF and lest you think we can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, the sow's ear being MDF. Let me show you a couple examples here. This is also MDF and that was sealed with shellac and that does a great job of handling the porosity of the MDF. And then it was over coated with what's called Beaten copper spray paint.

So it gives it that look of a hammered piece of metal when it's all done. This one, it's got a little bit of an antiquey sort of look to it. That was sprayed with a Beaten copper, then sprayed with a green, and then with a paintbrush just kinda wiped through that, to cut loose the green a little bit to reveal some of the copper that's below it. And this one was sprayed with an aerosol product that's designed to look like stone when it's done. So what's cool about MDF is it's very inexpensive.

So it's a great material to practice your CNC work on. And realistically, if you finish it correctly when it's done it doesn't look too bad. So a lot of new information here on this project. Covered a lot of ground with the VCarve. Importing our art work, bitmap work, setting up here in the CNC.

This follow along click-by-click will give you a really good project you can do in your shop with your CNC.