Shapeoko 2 CNC Machine - 189

it may not look like it right now but this is actually a desktop CNC machine a couple weeks ago the folks at inventables decom contacted me and asked if I would like to play around with their shapco 2 CNC machine and if they could send me one now I know there's a couple people out there that would probably say no to that offer but quite frankly I'm not one of [Music] them if you're not familiar with am.com it's a company out of Chicago and that is making the manufacturing process accessible for the everyday DIY mindset kind of person when opening the box you realized that they didn't send you a CNC machine instead they sent you 16 million different pieces that you're going to have to put together to make a CNC machine and the best advice I can give anybody with anything like this is to stay organized as best as possible have some type of work surface that you can leave and walk away from and take a break and come back with without the work surface being disturbed that way you still know where everything is and less of an opportunity for you to end up losing parts and speaking of losing Parts uh it's it was very beneficial for me to have one of these cheap little magnetic dishes to put all this little tiny itty bitty hardware and washers and and nuts and bolts into so I I don't accidentally lose them or let them roll off the side of the table although there are a lot of steps in putting this CNC machine together if you approach it just like any other complex woodworking project and break it down into just a bunch of simple processes which the instructions do uh then it's really just assembling small little sub assemblies and then assembling those sub assemblies into larger subassemblies it's all it's all nuts and bolts and putting stuff together however uh there was a couple spots in the instructions that I ended up wasting a lot of time looking for parts that were in previous versions of this kit that are no longer included in the kit and only to find out later upon reading the next paragraph or so that don't look for this part look for something different in this particular version so uh when you go to assemble this read through the entire section of steps before you actually go to uh assemble that particular step and also there's a lot of switching back and forth between um different parts of the document a in different Windows of your browser or tabs of your browser or Pages or whatever I think it could have been a lot easier if there's just a simple uh top to bottom PDF that you could download and just follow along but nevertheless it's all there you just have to read and follow the steps when it comes to assembly patience is key because quite frankly there's no way to to speed up the process any considerable amount it took me 7.38 hours to assemble this thing from opening up the box until right before hooking up the electrical wires now the electrical wires could have taken me a lot less time but I ended up hanging out with some friends and um not really focusing on it as I built it but in the end I tried to maintain a little bit of wire management and make everything nice and neat and it turned out all right the electrical really wasn't that bad uh I just kind of made it a little bit harder than it had to be because I really wasn't focusing on what I was doing the instructions do give you three different options for the wiring and I chose to use the terminal blocks that way I didn't have to do any soldering and I actually mounted the Arduino and gshield to a piece of 5 mm hardwood plywood and mounted it to the front of the Y AIS and these this is all just mounted with uh zip ties and no nuts and bolts with all the assembly and wiring done everything's checked to be square and parallel where it needs to be then you use a marker in the z-axis to run a program called hello world and that is your very first experience with using the CNC I didn't record it because quite frankly using a marker in a CNC is really boring so instead let's go ahead and cut something real quick I've drawn a line that is parallel to the x-axis and one line that is parallel to the Y AIS and this represents the actual work surface I don't want to have any material on these sides of these lines this represents zero in the X Direction and with positive values this way zero in the Y Direction with positive values this way and this location is the home location so every time I want to clamp something down I could either drill some holes for some actual hold down blocks or in this case I'm just using some double-sided tape on some primed one side birch plywood and from here I can line it up with my marks and stick it down so it's not going anywhere and then manually move the machine so that we are right over the home location and lower the bit so that it is just above the actual surface there's several different ways to send the actual cutting information from the computer to the CNC and the way I'm going to show you real quick is with eil.com it's a web based or browser based app that inventables put together to make this super simple and super easy now I've already messed around with this for uh quite a little bit um before I even got the CNC so I can get familiar with it so the first thing I'm going to do well actually the first thing do is go to eas.com and log in and from here I'm going to change my material I'm going to keep it on Birch because I am using birch plywood but I'm going to change the size the X direction for my uh scrap piece of plywood is 8.375 in and the y direction is 6.75 in now what that did is on the right hand side of the screen it updated your actual size that you're working with and from here you can change the material uh which changes the depth per pass or the feed rate right now I'm going to leave it at Birch because that's what I'm using like I said and I also want to change the machine settings the bit that I'm using is not 1/8 of an inch it is 0625 in 11/16th of an inch now you can make any type of simple geometrical shapes or you can go some with some freehand designing or some cool little Graphics or some text I'm going to drop a little text box down here and change this to say [Music] inventables now as you can see over here the right after the L it's being cut off this is too big so let's click outside to get out of the text editor click on it again move it into the bottom left area just a little bit and let's drag this corner to shrink it down so it'll fit on the plywood on the right side of the screen let's bump it up a little bit now because we have a lot of wasted space right here and I do want to cut some stuff let's do a little super awesome Mario mushroom just because we can and like I said it's awesome so let's make it bigger and that looks pretty cool so from here we can set it to make a fill cut which will cut all the inside stuff or the outline and I want to select all of this so I can select both of them at once and if you drag down it gets darker on the le- hand side and also gets um updated over here to give you a better graphical representation of what's actually going to be cut so darker the deeper you go uh closer to White the lighter you go now I just want to make one pass with this I don't want to go too crazy so my materials remember my depth per pass is 028 so if I change my depth for both of these cuts to 028 in it will make one cut on all that stuff after that it's as simple as going through the carve steps so let's click carve uh confirm that my material thickness is5 in it's not it is actually 3/4 in plywood so 75 in which really doesn't make that much of a difference for what I'm doing right now because it's uh not going that deep at all but let's confirm that my correct depth is there uh confirm that the material is secure the bit size is 1/6th of an inch let's confirm that uh the machine is in the home position let's confirm that let's press okay to raise the bit and I'm going to turn these spind on and then start carving which it's going to get pretty loud [Music] I did have to use some sandpaper to remove some of the little fuzzies around the edges but honestly that's a lot of material for a little 16th of an inch bit to remove and quite frankly it's a much more exci and satisfying hello world than using a Sharpie and a piece of paper so just for clarification I do have a little bit of CNC experience but it's totally different than this I have a previous job that I ran a 4tx 8T full sheet CNC machine and that was more or less just loading it up pushing a button and removing the parts when it was done that was pretty much it I haven't had any experience building or actually sending stuff to it so this is all new to me now in uh sent me this CNC at no cost to me in exchange for my honest opinions on this whether it be good or bad and overall it's just really cool that this whole process can be achieved where you you we're really bringing this CNC technology to anybody on a budget really it's not that expensive to get your hands on one of these things and the fact that it's all open source and completely customizable and changeable and you can do all kinds of stuff to better suit your needs with it that's pretty awesome for more information I will have a link in the description uh about this whole process as well as a link to inventables to where you can learn more about this particular shapo 2 CNC router thanks for watching folks a