How to best create CNC-friendly wood joinery

I used VCarve to create the Knapp joint. It took about an hour to make the fixture for vertical milling with leftover wood and hardware. It is not as fancy as the one made by @WillAdams but it is solid and accurate.

5 Likes

Huh, I really like your setup. I’d been lacking the desire to get a setup for joinery in place after seeing Richard Cournoyer’s right angle bracket jig out of aluminum.

This one looks simple enough to make out of MDF/plywood or aluminum and bracket it up without it needed to hang down a lot vertically. Thanks for sharing the picture!

1 Like

It is really simple look at how it is made under. I use two metal angles (2"X2"), 4 bolts to hold those to the horizontal support (1"X4") that have holes to attach to my wasteboard, two pieces of 3/4in plywood to hold the workpieces attached with two 4in bolts with butterfly nut to attach them to the metal angle.

Here is a look under the fixture.

That’s pretty simple and elegant!

Do you find that it’s enough support when plunging down material? (vs something like @WillAdams’ approach that supports the wood from underneath as well with the crazy long bolts)

Well the only thing I can say is that I never had material move any time I used it. The only thing I would change is to use hardwood to replace the plywood to increase stiffness because as you see in the first picture, I had to place material on either side to ensure the plywood stayed flat. I did not have any spare hardwood properly sized when I built the fixture.

2 Likes

I will note that I expect the wood to be held in place by clamps at the top (I ground off a couple to fit, and sourced a few more intend for clamping as stops which I need to fabricate some sort of bracket for) — the threaded rods and speed nuts and bottom support are simply to allow consistent positioning and easy adjustment of board positioning.

I loved the flexible wood book covers had anyone managed to do this on their shapeoko, it would be great to try but I’m just a newbie so beyond me.

Those should be trivial — just mill out a series of pockets or V carvings which are periodic along the length of the axis — try drawing one out and doing a test cut in a scrap of material — if it doesn’t work, post your file and a photo of the results and we’ll do our best to work through it with you.

Fantastic thank you​:uk::us:

On a Fusion360 tip, I’m sure many have come across this add-in already, but I came across Dogbone which makes some nice automated work of the process.

Obviously from the name it’s only good for dogbones, but at least it’s something.

What sort of joinery would you like to do?

Let me know the details of:

  • joinery type
  • stock dimensions
  • project dimensions
  • desired features

and I’ll gladly work up a parametric instance for cutting it out.

Oooh.

I initially wanted to do something like this:

I actually modeled a bunch of it manually (which was a bit of a pain) before realized I wouldn’t be able to cut the geometry from the base (before I saw the stuff about a vertical joint).

My design is using 12mm stock, and roughly 400(height), 380(width), 310(depth(base)).

I ended up making a more vanilla-tab design, including manually putting in the dogbones (this is before I found the Dogbone add-in I linked above):

2 Likes

Do you need assistance making a file for this? Dimensions? Stock thickness?

It’s quite reminiscent of: Design into 3D: Boxes: Magazine storage

2 Likes

I think I can manage creating the shapes, and have been getting my head around parameters, now after watching a bunch more videos.

Oh, that’s quite nice! So many old/exciting posts on here.

1 Like

Although it’s been quite a while since I looked at the dogbone extension, it didn’t leave much for customization. It centered the circle on the corners which will leave gaps in your piece. Although it can get tedious, I’d still recommend drawing the dogbones.

2 Likes

Joinery type: various simple but fun CNC options including dovetail, finger joints, rabbit, etc.
Stock thickness for me is often 0.75 inches
Project dimensions: Vary but boards are often around 4 inches wide
Desired features: Some I want efficiency and some I want to be pretty

I saw your impressive stuff replicating that Rockler dado/plywood box blade profile. I’m a hobby programmer (python and R) and would be interested in partnering up if you would find that useful. I’m currently using Fusion 360, but also run into this issue, where simple dimension tweaks to model or stock waste a tone of time just to re-generating/expor paths.

I thought that was really cool and if you start up something anew, or want to investigate a robust/flexible generator, open source and programmatically generated CAD and/or tool paths are very, very much of interest to me. I use linux most of the time, so this fills a huge gap where there are not many, if any, [good] options.

3 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

The Fingermaker software is now freely available as noted at: