Long time without an update! I tried carving name plates for my coworkers, but that showed me my table wasn’t flat enough ( What holiday gifts are you making? ) so I replaced my OSB top with MDF. Much better, but still had a bow/sag, so I took the top off again and did my best to shim the table to be level across (more detail and pics in the linked thread).
Now that my table is nice and flat-flat, I was able to carve the name plates across basically my full X axis just about perfectly (meaning nobody would notice but the guy who made it lol). But then… Murphy struck.
I couldn’t home Z reliably, it would work sometimes but sometimes it wouldn’t. X-max side would home correctly, but then the X-min side would stop moving ~20 mm from home, and I’d get the alarm about being unable to find an end stop. I checked everythingggg lol turned out to be two issues!
- The two bolts in
z stub minwere not tight enough at all. They caused slack in the lifting/dropping movement, so it would be missing steps as the screw would move, but the machine wouldn’t.- Thankfully I was able to push a flat head up against the nuts and screw them in
- Fixing this got the machine to go like half way closer to home before binding up! Imagine my elation lmaooo
- My front strut plate was poorly made due to my machine at the time having a wobbly core (was afraid of tightening the bolts so they were hella loose). I never had this problem, but it’s winter now and I built it in the summer, so I bet the seasonal change was the last straw. It is 4.5 mm plywood, some junk from Lowes, and it was butting up against x-min. Also the slots for the braces were wayyy too tight. Probably also due to my new table top actually being flat.
- Anyways, I took it off, sanded and filed it down some. Used my new HF 6” disc and 1” belt sander combo that Santa got me <3 Reassembled, still too god damn tight lmao.
- Took it off again. Used my Dremel as a router for the first time and carved that thing uppp lol and sweet Jesus it finally works!!!
So I couldn’t stop for the day without making something with the machine, testing some movements and Z-homing wasn’t going to satisfy my anxiety lol. So I finally made a legit spoil board with the MatchFit slots and Festool MFT dog holes! Thread here: Dovetail/MatchFit Spoil Board w/ MFT holes
So now I’ve got a dialed in table, machine, and multiple days off in a row… time to make some stuff!