Rick here.
Much in the way that SmartShop CNC
has revolutionized the way you process your panels,
Laguna is taking another giant leap forward
in automation for the cabinet industry.
With that in mind, Laguna engineered the SmartShop LD4,
the next wave in automation for the cabinet industry.
The LD4 uses spring pins and H clips,
completely eliminating the need for glue and screws.
Your cabinets can ship flat pack
and be assembled in minutes on site
without the use of any tools,
which of course saves you time and money.
With the Laguna SmartShop LD4,
cabinet assembly truly is a snap.
So without further ado, we'd like to show you
how this is all done.
So sit back, relax and enjoy
the Laguna SmartShop LD4, hosted by Max Miller.
Thank you.
(light upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Max, head of Design and Applications
here at Laguna.
I'm here with the LD4.
It's an automated system for inserting Lockdowel fasteners.
If you're not already familiar with the Lockdowel system,
essentially an alternative cabinet assembly method
that uses clips and pins in place
of your typical fasteners that you'd use,
like say dowels or screws.
The LD4 is intended to be used alongside a router
such as the SmartShop III, the idea being
that you're cutting your parts out on the CNC router,
and then you're inserting them into the LD4 to receive pins.
I'm going to use Mozaik for this project,
and along the way I'm gonna describe to you
how I set up the construction method
that I wanted to use for this cabinet
and how I integrated the Lockdowel system.
Regardless of whatever construction method
you need to use for your project,
whether it be face frame or frameless,
whatever thickness of material
or material options you need,
you can use Mozaik to develop
that cabinet construction method
and you can integrate the Lockdowel system
and use our LD4 to create your cabinets
quickly, efficiently, and with very little effort.
(upbeat music)
So now let's step into Mozaik,
and I'll show you how I made this cabinet.
I'm making this demo cabinet using Mozaik,
which is one of several software options out there
that have already implemented the Lockdowel system.
That means they've already done a lot of the legwork
as far as setting up tools for the Lockdowel
and templates that we can use on the job.
So I'm creating a new file.
I'm going to call it LD4Cab.
Next, I'm going to go into the Room Settings tab.
We can define universal settings here
for each room in a project.
You can have as many rooms as you need.
In my case, I only need one room.
Now I'm gonna make a couple changes here
that will affect that room.
I'm gonna change these doors to be slab style doors,
and I'm going to change the hinge connection
to be a Euro frameless hinge connection,
because these are gonna be frameless cabinets.
Lastly, let me go down to my material templates.
Right now they're set as plywood.
I'm gonna go and grab the 3/4" Melamine templates.
In the Room tab, we can start to define the kitchen.
There are some default templates on the left-hand side.
I'm gonna stick to this single wall template.
If this were a real kitchen, I could go on to define
windows, sinks, appliances, stuff like that,
before adding cabinets.
But the single wall is fine for what I need to do.
So I'm just gonna move on to the Products tab,
and that's where we're going to add our cabinet.
It's an easy drag-and-drop system.
So I'll just grab this single door cabinet
and drop it against the wall.
Now, there are an endless number of ways
that I could edit this cabinet from its default parameters,
but I'm fine with the way the cabinet currently is,
except that, of course, we need to define the fasteners.
Mozaik templates are stored in libraries.
So to define the LD4 template for this cabinet,
I'm gonna open up the library for Hardware,
and then I'm gonna open up the library for Joint Fasteners.
Mozaik actually comes with a template
already created for the Lockdowel channel lock.
It includes the correct route path,
and it contains a pretty good system
for positioning those Lockdowel channel locks
along each joint.
If I go and open up the joint
for where the top and bottom of the cabinet
are going to meet the ends or sides of the cabinet,
you can see it's gonna define a few different locations.
The first location is going to be 20 mm from the front.
The next location will be added only if
the joint length is greater than 210 mm,
it'll place one 180 mm from the front.
And so forth.
However, the LD4 has a sensor
to measure the lengths of parts,
and it allows us to program it parametrically
for greater ease of use.
So I've copied the Mozaik template
and I've kept the same route path,
but I've altered the logic for the joint locations.
You can see all this part is the same.
But if I go in here to the joint connection,
in my case, the first location is the same,
20 mm from the front.
But the second location,
rather than being measured from the front,
is measured from the rear.
That means that regardless of how long I make each cabinet,
it will always draw the groove
beginning at 116 mm from the rear.
Then for my third location, if the joint is long enough,
it'll add a third groove at the center of the joint.
That's the channel lock template.
We also need to define the spring pin joint,
which is quite easy to do.
I've already created a new template
called Lockdowel Spring Pins, and in there
I've set the fastener type to drill holes,
and I've defined a single hole
as a drill diameter of 8 mm and a depth of 16 mm,
which is described to us by Lockdowel.
They provide you with documentation
for all of their hardware.
In this case I don't have it adding
a fastener for the top and bottom,
because of course I'm going to be using
the channel lock for those.
Instead, I have them being applied
to the nailers and the toes.
So if I go into the toe here,
you can see I have two locations set,
20 mm from the top of the joint
and 20 mm from the bottom of the joint.
So that's where it's gonna insert those pins.
That's the fastener setup.
Now what's really, really cool about this,
when you get into the LD4 side of things,
is I can have a single program,
a single program, that I will use
for every single one of these parts.
That program will have a series
of parametric if-then statements.
Essentially, if the edge that you slide into the LD4
is short enough, it'll put spring pins in.
Then if it's longer than that length,
it'll put channel locks in,
based on the logic that I've described here.
Now, what's really cool is when
we take this over to the LD4,
because we can use parametric programming
to describe all of this using a single program.
When I push a part in, the machine is going to measure
the edge length of the part I pushed in,
and if it's a long edge length
it'll put channel locks in.
But if it's a short edge length
it won't put channel locks in
and it'll put only spring pins in.
So all of my parts done with a single file.
I'm gonna open this up in Google Sketchup
for a better view of the cabinet.
I'll change to X-ray mode so you can see this.
The lines along the top and bottom
represent those channel lock grooves that we'll be cutting.
Then if I move over to this nailer you can see
the spring pin holes that will be drilled out.
This is a good way to verify
if your parameters are set right.
All of this looks correct.
So I'm going to close out of Sketchup
and move on to optimizing the parts for the machine.
I'm gonna head to the Cut List tab
and I'll click this Optimize button,
choose the 3/4" Melamine parts.
In the Optimization menu, we can define the specifics
of how the parts will be cut,
what machine is doing the routing,
and we can produce the G code
to eventually run on the machine.
I'm gonna head to the Optimize tab within this menu.
Now, in order to cut those slots for the channel lock,
we need to add the channel slot cutter tool to our tool set.
This is done in the CNC Tooling Library.
So I'll head up here to Libraries, CNC Tooling.
The Slot Cutter Tool is already defined by Mozaik correctly,
so it's just a matter of adding it to a tool set,
along with any other tools we'll be using.
Up through here in Tool Sets you can create a new tool set.
I've already done so and called it Demo Tool Set.
You can see I have a couple 3/8" tools here,
got a couple 1/4" tools here
to do some of the smaller pockets,
and then I have that Lockdowel slot cutter
to cut those grooves.
As long as you have that added,
you'll be cutting the slots correctly.
Next, we can optimize the parts for sheet efficiency.
I'll quickly verify that everything
looks correct on the sheet.
Finally, I'll generate my G code to send to the router.
(upbeat music)
The LD4 takes it one step further.
Not only does it bore your holes and drill the grooves
necessary to insert the pins, but you can load them
into these two top compartments
and it will insert those pins for you as you go.
Programs can be loaded parametrically
or scanned in using the barcode scanner.
In my case, I just wrote a simple parametric program.
What it does is, it measures the board length
of each piece that's inserted,
and then it evenly distributes either channel locks
or spring pins, based on the length of the boards.
So if it's a small board, it's gonna insert two spring pins.
If it's a longer board, it'll automatically know
not to insert spring pins and instead
put those channel locks in,
three channel locks, four channel locks,
however many are necessary,
based on the length of that board.
(upbeat music)
Just to highlight some key features of the Lockdowel system,
part of what makes it so great
is that all the fasteners are inserted
into the sides of the cabinets rather than on the top,
so it's very easy to flat pack ship this
to its destination.
(upbeat music)
Then once it gets there, you don't need any glue
or fasteners to put it together.
It's all ready to go.
You just slot the pieces in.
Really, other than a mallet, you don't even need
any other equipment to assemble your cabinets.
(upbeat music)
You may be wondering why four zones?
It's true, if we were cutting a single cabinet
we could stick to zones A and B,
the idea being that we would push this into zone A,
it'll cut that edge, and then I'd flip it around
and push it into zone B, which will cut a mirror image
of whatever zone A would be.
You don't have to use it that way,
but that's the general idea.
Then zones C and D get into production, right?
We don't want any down time.
So now we can push one part into zone A,
come over here while that's running,
and push another part into zone C.
Once it's done completing that,
it'll automatically go to zone C and start,
and we have time to flip this part around and push it in.
When it's done with zone C, it moves on to zone B.
Once it's done with that, we'll already have loaded
what was in C, now flipped it around and put it in zone D.
While it's doing that, we'll come back over here
and we'll insert the next part into zone A.
What you have is a seamless operation with no down time,
and only a single operator is required
to run this whole process.
Thanks for watching this video.
I hope you found it informative.
If you want more information on the LD4,
there should be a link somewhere around here
that you can click,
or just wait till the end of the video
and there'll be a phone number that you can dial
for more information, again about the LD4
or any of our other products.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)
(light music)
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