Shapeoko XL - first steps on ABS/HDPE

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

To expand on @Julien’s excellent answer, I will note that we have a standing offer — if you get stuck on a file or project, send it in to us at support@carbide3d.com and we will do our best to help you work through it — many of the tutorials which are available are the result of such requests.

For the design aspect, you may find the following links of interest:

Creating designs from elements

If one has a design idea one wants to make, usually it can be shown / mocked up as a pixel image, and put together using some basic elements. For example: [image2] All one should need for that is a portion of a U.S. flag, and the Marine Corps seal — fortunately, both are easily sourced on Wikimedia Commons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Flag_of_the_United_States.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Seal_of_the_United_States_Marine_Corps.svg

Let's make a coaster

The prototypical first job for a Shapeoko is to cut a coaster — here we do this using Carbide Create, trying to make the job as simple as possible, but adding a bit of interest with an inlay, and increasing the utility of the object by rounding off the corners. Before any real setup it will be best to go into Job Setup and Clear the drawing, and set the measurement units — please use mm (metric) for this tutorial. Note that the feeds and speeds in the Carbide 3D charts are given in Imperial inc…

— obsolete with CC’s new corner options, but a useful tutorial on Boolean operations or doing this to imported or drawn objects

Let's draw an "ellipse" with new users

(the title of this post hearkens back to a small book / card which Warren Chappell created, “Let’s make a “B” for Bennet” — I was fortunate to meet Mr. Chappell when he was Artist-in-Residence at UVA on a school field trip when I was young, and he was the author, along with his cousin Oscar Ogg, of a number of books I remember from my youth.) Note that the below is obsoleted in current versions of Carbide Create by the ability to asymmetrically scale a circle into an oval/ellipse. Okay, step-b…

— very basic tutorial on drawing with the curve tool — also see:

Let's Make a B (for anyone)

Ages ago, there was an elegant little pamphlet entitled “Let’s Make a B for Bennet” which Warren Chappell wrote and illustrated. Here’s a discussion of how to use Carbide Create’s new curve feature to draw a B. We start with an image of a “B”: https://www.flickr.com/photos/letterformarchive/38372487832/in/album-72157687338823192/ [38372487832_6b4562b0a5_o]