In this video, we'll be taking a look at how to set up your Makera Carvera as well as the Cyclone dust collector if you have it. Please ensure you still read and follow the included instruction manual, as it has some important catches, like if your machine doesn't do X, then give Y a go. Think of this video as a sort of visual primer or companion to complement your included written instructions. Let's get into it.

Starting off, this machine is quite heavy. The box it arrives in weighs about 65 kilos, and the machine itself is about 50 kilos when fully unpacked. Getting the Caravera out of the packaging and onto a workbench is going to be a two-person job, and ensure you lift with your knees, not with your back. Now the machine itself is fairly ready to go. There are just a few small things we need to do.

First of all, remove the bundle of parts from inside the machine. In this bundle, you should find a toolbox containing all your bits and clamps, the accessory box with all the cables and extras you need, and the materials box containing some of the stock or material that we're going to be using in the example cutting guide. You will then need to remove seven screws from these mounts holding the bed in place and the three screws holding the spindle carriage in place, as well as this little bit of tape holding the dust collector. It might be wise to keep these mounts and their screws in case you ever need to move your machine to another workshop or something like that.

Under one of these bed mounts, you will also find an Allen key and some extra bolts. You will need to screw two of these bolts into the panels on the front of the machine and two into the head of the machine. These are just replacing some of the screws that we used to mount the brackets. The machine will come with its dust shoe lock in the raised position. To release it, pull out the black knob and rotate it about 30 degrees. This will allow it to move freely up and down. Have a play with re-locking the shoe up and unlocking it as you may be doing it often.

For now, leave it down, but ensure it is not locked there. You want it to be able to move freely up and down. If you follow the dust shoe's tube up, you will find that it can be connected to two inlets. The inlet on the left will use the Carvera's inbuilt dust collector vacuum system, and the one on the right will connect it to the standard size 22mm or 7/8 inch hose connector on the back. Now the inbuilt dust collector on the Carvera is probably good enough for most jobs, but we will be setting up the cyclone dust extractor as we're running this in a nice clean workshop and the cyclone will just help catch a bit more of that dust and keep the room a bit cleaner.

In the base of the cyclone, you'll find all your parts and you'll just need to lock the hose onto the back of the machine and then press the other end into the Carvera's outlet. You'll also find a control cable for your cyclone. Now unfortunately, your Carvera won't have a connector for it. The control port is only on the newer Z1 and Carvera Air models, but all this is doing is letting the machine turn on the cyclone extractor automatically. It still works fine just manually.

On the back of your Carvera, you will however find a connector for your e-stop. So very importantly, plug this in and place it or mount it in an easy to access position. Also on the back of the machine, you will find an 8mm air inlet for the Carvera's air assist. Now you will need an external source of compressed air for this feature, but you can get away without using it like we're doing here. Essentially, this air assist feature is only for when the vacuum and dust chute system won't cut it.

For example, if you're using the fourth axis module, the dust chute isn't going to be really effectively sucking things up. So you'll need to use the air assist to help with chip extraction. Sometimes if you're milling metals, it might help out to have this air assist instead of the dust vacuuming. And if you're using the inbuilt laser cutter to engrave something, the air assist can help just get a little bit more of a cleaner engrave. So it's not essential to set this up, but depending on what you're doing with your machine, it might be a good idea and a quick Google can help determine when to use it.

But for most things, it should be good. If you have the air assist plugged in, pull out the blue knob and rotate it to open up the valve. Then go ahead and angle the nozzle to blow directly onto the tip. You will also need to raise and lock the dust chute upwards because you can't use the dust chute and air assist at the same time, as they kind of block each other. It's one or the other, depending on the job.

A quick thing while we're looking at the spindle carriage, on the bottom side, you'll find a cover over the laser module. Obviously, remove this cap if you are going to be engraving with the laser, but if you aren't, leave it on. Don't accidentally remove it during the setup process. In the accessories box, you'll find the phone or tablet stand. The software we use to control the machine and send it all the instructions can be run from a mobile device and this stand provides just a nice little holder for it. It's also got a USB port to power the device as well. And if you want, it can be installed on the other side of the machine.

Alrighty, one more step before we fire it up. Place the tools in the tool changer. Now there is a little joke of a warning sign you might see around CNC machines like this, and it reads something like, this machine does not know the difference between metal and flesh, nor does it care. So whenever you stick your hands in the machine, especially around the spindle, ensure that the e-stop is pressed and you're not sending any instructions to the machine or something like that. And maybe even switch off the machine just to be safe. First, we're going to pop in the wireless probe, which can be found in your accessories box.

This just needs to be firmly pressed into the rear slot and it will charge wirelessly when the machine is turned on. In your toolbox, you will find a series of bits ready to be loaded into the tool changer slots, and there is actually a recommended order for these. Look for the single flute in the yellow lidded box and put it into tool slot one. This bit will be your main cutting bit for things like plastics and wood. Then grab the orange lidded single flute engraving bit. This has a tiny 0.2 millimeter tip that can be used for detailed engraving work.

The other yellow lidded box has a corn cob bit in it. It looks like a corn cob. This is going to be your bit for milling composite materials like fiberglass, carbon fiber, and PCBs. Whack it in slot three. And finally, grab the other single flute bit from the green lidded box. This is similar to our first bit, but it's shorter and designed to mill metals instead of plastics and wood. If you bought a PCB manufacturing kit, pop in the UV solder mask removal tool into slot five as well. This fifth bit isn't included in the standard kit, and if you don't have it, just ignore it and move on.

Tool slot six is left empty as the 1-8 test rod lives in it. The machine will come loaded with this test rod in it, as if you don't use the machine for a while, you need something in there to keep that clamping mechanism happy. Now, you don't always need to have the tools in this config. You can change it to whatever you want, but the example cutting tutorials use this layout. So if you're going to do them, ensure that you follow these steps. If you do have other bits in mind, there is a handy tool to attach the bit collars to them to make them compatible with the tool-swapping system.

And with that, we can plug in and turn on our Carvera and Cyclone. One little thing, it is recommended to fully charge the wireless probe before your first job. It has a yellow light on it indicating that it's charging, and after about 30 minutes of charging, it'll turn off when it's full. In the meantime, we can start setting up Carvera Controller. Now, we did set up the mobile device stand, but we're going to be installing this on a laptop and plugging in the machine via the included USB-C cable, as we think it's just a little bit more reliable than, you know, sending all the instructions over Wi-Fi.

Please do not use a random USB-C cable. It needs to be a high-speed one like the one that's included with the kit. Then go ahead and install Carvera Controller, and that's it. Your machine is done and ready to get cutting. Makerra does include some good getting started example cutting tutorials if you want to follow along with them. One of them makes like a light-up lamp with a PCB and then some other, you know, little gizmos and whatnot.

But to wrap up this video, we're going to go ahead and complete the third axis relief example, which is kind of a bread-and-butter example of CNC milling. To follow along, you'll need to go into your materials box and grab a sheet of epoxy tooling board, and then also cut down a sheet of two-millimeter MDF wasteboard down to about 100 millimeters by 150 millimeters. This is going to be placed under the tooling board to prevent our bed from being damaged.

Then grab the low-profile L bracket from the tooling kit, and with the shorter bolts, mount it to the bottom left of the bed. Then place your stock nice and flush against this bracket, and using the longer bolts, start to clamp it down with these four clamps. On the edge of each clamp is a little lip that sits on the edge of your stock to help hold it down. Ensure you firmly tighten all of these into place, careful not to, you know, comically over-tighten them, but just tighten them enough to hold it down, as that spinning mill bit will try and rip the stock away from the bed.

Now go ahead and open up Carvera Controller. In the top left, connect to your machine via USB, select the COM port it's using, and then in the bottom left, open a G-code file. Then, under examples, relief, you'll find this pirate ship file that we're cutting with. Usually you'll need to use another piece of software called CAM. Makerra has its own versions called Makerra CAM or Makerra Studio, depending on when you're watching. And this software generates the G-code, which tells the machine how to actually cut out your part, how to actually move the milling bit to, you know, create the thing you want to create.

Thankfully, though, they have already done that for us with this demo, and we can just go ahead and open up the file. In the bottom left, select start running the G-code, and then we'll have this little, you know, settings window pop up. We'll then need to go ahead and set the work origin. This is where we will tell the machine to start cutting from. We'll set it to anchor one and offset it by three millimeters in the X and Y directions. This is telling our machine, hey, I want you to start at anchor one, which is that corner of the bracket that we installed.

And we're just basically saying, I want you to move three millimeters in each direction and kind of use that as the starting point. Now, usually you would use something a bit more than three millimeters, maybe 10 or 15 millimeters. But as you can see with the green box, our cutting area is well clear of our clamps. We aren't accidentally going to cut our L bracket or something like that. Then, under the Z probe config, we're going to go ahead and offset that by five millimeters in each direction from the path origin.

This is telling our machine to start measuring the height of our material with the wireless probe that we installed five millimeters inwards in each direction from the corner of that green box. And with that, we can close our lid and hit run. If you are using an external vacuum system, turn it on as well. If you're using the cyclone, we found that about 60% is a good number for this job. The machine will grab the first tool bit and it'll do a roughing pass where it cuts down the bulk of the material, and then it will change to the second bit and run through with a very fine engraving.

This whole process will take a little over two hours, so grab a book or some Instagram reels if you're inclined, or just ensure that you're in the room because you shouldn't leave the machine unattended while it's cutting. When it's done, you'll have your piece mostly cut out of your stock, but it will be held in place by these little tabs. This is just to ensure that it doesn't get thrown around as it's, you know, cutting it out. It just leaves a little bit attached to your stock and your clamps. You will need to manually cut these off. There's a little saw included in the accessories kit, and maybe even give it a sand down.

And with that, you have just cut your first thing on your Makera Carver, and damn is it pretty intricate. That was quite a long job because it's so detailed, but you know, it is nice to just have a detailed piece lying around to flex what your machine can do. If you need a hand with anything from this video, or you just have any carver questions, feel free to head on over to our maker forums. We're all makers over there and happy to help. Until next time though, happy making.