Today is the last video in my CNC with Me series where I take the files included with the introduction pack to

CNC with Me, and I walk through the end-to-end process of generating toolpaths, cutting those projects out, and hopefully

proving how easy it is to get into this CNC hobby. If you are interested in the CNC with Me program, I will leave a link

down below in the description. In the interest of full disclosure, I have no affiliation with Hamilton or CNC with Me,

but I did pay my own hard-earned money to become a community member, so you can connect with me there as well as

hundreds of other CNC nerds. In my last video, I ran through the detailed process of bringing an SVG into Carbide Create,

creating the toolpaths, exporting those toolpaths to my 1finity CNC, and creating this amazing little catch-all.

Now, we had a few hiccups along the way, but in the end, we created this catch-all

without too many problems. In the first video in this series, we did the exact same thing with Fusion 360, where we

created this catch-all. I didn't have any hiccups with that particular project, but that's how things go with CNC. I will

leave links to both videos down in the description if you're interested in checking those out. Today, we are going to

wrap up the series by reproducing these projects using Inventables Easel, but applying some of the lessons that we've

learned along the way. All right, let's go ahead and jump over to the computer where I will get into Easel and we will

Here we are in Easel. It is a website; you just go to the URL easel.

inventables.com. You log in, you create a new project, and this is the screen that you will see to start off things.

We're going to do a quick walkthrough of the user interface here. So, what you have on the left-hand side is a toolbar with

a couple of different interesting things we'll get to in a minute. In the sort of center-left here, we have the

canvas, which is where you draw all of your vectors. And then on the right-hand side, by default, we do have a 3D

rendering of what you draw on the left-hand side. You can drag the viewpoint here back and forth if you

want, or you can use these little arrows right here to collapse it left or right. On the top right-hand

side, this is where you set your stock size and your bits, and we will get to that in just a minute. Then on the bottom

here, you do have the opportunity to create multiple sheets. This is an advantage over Carbide Create, in my

opinion. You can have multiple versions of your vector here with different toolpaths on it, and so that's something that

I find useful, especially when I'm doing inlays that you really can't do in Carbide Create, which is limited to a

single design. All right, so real quick, the first thing we want to do is we want to set our stock size, just like we've

done in the past. And so the default here is birch plywood. We are going to scroll down and find something. Maple is... let's

see... hard maple. Perfect, that's exactly what we want. And then we know that we want it 8 by 8, because that's what we've been

working with in the past. And then the thickness here was 21 mm, and so I'm going to type in 21 mm. This is

something that I also found interesting that Fusion does and Easel does, but Carbide Create does not do: if I type in

21 mm, it automatically converts it—uh, turns it into inches or whatever the units are that you have. So Carbide Create

didn't do that, and I found that a little frustrating, a little annoying because I had to manually compute it, but it is

what it is in this lower corner here. You can see that you can select between the front left corner or center if you

remember, Fusion has a lot more options, and Carbide Create had more than this but less than Fusion. So that's just

something to know, but you can select center if you want to do that. And really, I really only ever use front left or

center; I don't use any other position. So these two, in my opinion, are simply just fine. So I'm going to go ahead and I am

going to click up here in the toolbar, and we're going to dismiss this by clicking right there. And then the next

thing we want to do is we want to import our SVG. So I'm going to collapse this guy just like that so we have more

real estate. We're going to go under Project, import SVG. We're going to select our dog foot

SVG, as we've done before, and it's going to import it. Now you will notice that, for some reason, both Fusion 360 and

Carbide Create imported it in the proper size; Easel does not. I don't know why. I

haven't been able to figure it out. I think it might have something to do with the uh DPI that it was saved at, um, but

it's hard to say. But the good news is, this is super easy to fix. What we need

to do is go over here to where it says Shape and Size, make sure the little lock icon is locked so you maintain that

aspect ratio, and then we're going to type in eight, and we're going to—I just hit tab, or you can press enter, and it

automatically resizes it to 8 inches. Now it looks like here that it can be a little

a bit bigger than 8 inches, which is interesting because in theory our stock is 8 by 8. I guess that's because there is

a border in the SVG, so I'm going to go ahead and bump this up. Let's say 8.25

8.25 okay. Now, the other thing you can do here is you can say "Center to material." That makes it a lot easier to put things

right in the center. The next thing with Easel: what it does is it automatically assumes that you want to do a profile

path on everything that you import, which is a little annoying because we don't want to do that, but it's easy to fix. So

what I'm going to show you here is I'm going to deselect all of these. I am going to first select the outside ring.

For this first operation, we do not want to cut that outside ring; we want to cut those pockets first. So the way you have

to do this in Easel is you select "cut" here, and then you change your cut depth to zero. That is how you tell Easel that

you do not want to cut a specific vector. And you can see that is—sort of, whoops—you can see here, if you zoom in, it is

still there on the screen, but it is not highlighted, which means it's not going to be cut. So again, that's a little

annoying. I wish it was like dotted or dashed or something like that, but it is what it is. So here I'm going to go ahead

and select—uh, hit the Shift key, hold this down—and select all of these vectors so that we can create our

pocketing path. Then over here, we want to change our cut—right here where it says "cut path"—we want to click this and

say "Clear out pocket," just like that. And then we want to change our cut depth to that 15 mm that we used last time. There

you go. Now, by default here, again, it's chosen this 1/8 inch bit, which is not—not what we want, so we want to change our

Bit, so we're going to click "bit" right here, and you can see there are a couple of pre-ann options; none of them are the bit

that we want. Now, there are a lot fewer bits here than there were in Carbide Create, but I actually think this user

interface is a lot easier to use. It shows you a picture of the bit; it's not overwhelming; you don't have to select

your machine. Uh, it's just very much more straightforward. So what we're going to do is we're going to select "other." It

does allow you to use one other bit, so we're going to select that. We're going to tell it that it is 0.75 inches in diameter,

and then we are going to click this guy right here. Now, the next thing that we need to do is we need to adjust our cut

parameters, because when we created that bit—I'm going to use that in air quotes—uh, we didn't set any of those cut

parameters. So we're going to do that right here. And again, a difference between Fusion and Carbide and Easel is

Easel has two fundamental modes: it's called automatic mode, where they choose the feed and speeds for you, and then

manual mode, where you get to type in your own. So if you're just beginning and you don't know what you're doing—you

know anything about feeds or speeds—automatic mode is the way to go. It is very, very, very conservative; you will likely have

success no matter what you do, unless you do something completely inappropriate. But, uh, I'm going to go ahead and click

into manual mode because I want to use the cut settings that we used in the last project, uh, just to make sure that it is

capable of doing it. So, so what we do is we click "manual." We're going to change that feed rate to 80; we're going to

change the plunge to 40; and we use point—we end up at 0.125, if you remember in

The last, um, whoops! If you remember the last project, so, uh, there are a couple fill methods here where you have offset

and raster, and then Y-axis, which is a Pro feature, um, and you do have the ability, if you have Pro, to do a ramp, um, I do not

have Pro. Uh, you do get, um, five free Pro months if you had purchased an X-Carve

at one point in the past, or if you have an X-Carve, uh, so I do have that option

because I did have an X-Carve at one point, but we won't do that here because I want to compare and contrast to the

same thing that we did in, uh, Carbide Create. But you can see in Easel, even though you can ramp, you do not have very

many options for ramping in terms of the, uh, setup. You have a 5° and a 20°, so

for something like this, I would probably do either one of these; should be fine. I generally ramp at 20°

unless I'm doing something special, um, or around 8°. So 5° in this case, so

all right, so we have our cut settings for our dog feet. That is good. Now, how do we add that next vector? This is where

things get just a little bit complicated in Easel. I'm going to click this plus thing here to use an additional bit, so

you click the plus, it's going to open that menu again, and I'm going to dismiss—I'm going to dismiss that window, so get

the same window that pops up again. You can see the same bit selection. What you don't see here, for some very odd reason,

is a 1/4 inch flat end mill. You only see 8th and 16th. That is super weird to me

because a 1/4 inch end mill is a go-to end mill for everything, so I am going to

Click "other" again, and I'm going to type in 025, just like that. Then, I'm going to select this. We're going to

go to cut settings. Now you can see there are two panes in the cut settings window: one for what they call a

roughing path and one for the detailed path. So typically, this would be used for cutting with the same bit, where you want

to do an aggressive cut with your roughing and then a more refined or a more nuanced cut with your detailed. In

this case, we're just going to use two entirely different bits. I'm going to select "manual" here. I'm going to select

uh, 80 again, 40, and then .125 again. And there you go. Now that we have that

second bit set, I want to go ahead and select it. Make sure everything's fine; it looks good. I am going to select that

outside canvas that we did right here. And now, with that 1/4-inch bit set, I want to say

cut the outside shape path, so we don't make the mistake that we made with Carbide Create. Outside shape path, just

Easel for Beginners - Your FIRST Project in 6 MINUTES

Easel for Beginners - Your FIRST Project in 6 MINUTES

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