We have it fairly dialed in and have designed and made several useful parts, but still asking newbie questions. We purchased a large table resurfacing bit and wrote the gcode to surface the entire table top by 2mm to remove any high/low spots. That part worked, but we noticed that there were marks being made on the leading side of the bit pass. After more measuring, it appears the top of my spindle in tilted into the gantry at a very slight angle so the leveling bit is not perfectly perpendicular to the table thus gauging into the surface on the leading edge of the bit when running a resurfacing job. so…today’s question: Is there a way to adjust the spindle so it is perfectly vertical?
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You can tram it with piece of tape inside the clamps. That’s the usual way to do it. Its also usually best to stay with a smaller bit like a 1/2" dovetail bit and just go faster. The larger the bit the more perfect you need your tram to be. I personally fought this for too long trying to use a 1 1/4" surfacing bit and when I finally listened to @vicious1 and got the dovetail bit I was surprised at how much better of a finish I had.
Also you can use @jamiek surfacing tool to have it cut in only one direction and that can help as well.
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ive been doing a fair bit of surfacing of slabs lately, with the below tool from temu ,
surprised me of how good the blades are even on Kauri.
1st few trials was getting the same issue , and my router is not dead plumb
after playing round more, i come up with theses settings.
what i do now is run normally .5mm 1st pass to test wood dentistry etc
at 3600mm/m dial 1 on router so about 10000rpm prob should be bit faster rps but cheap router gets bit hot with that sized bit at
depended on timber, number of passes required after that to get to depth leaving .5mm of stock
than 2 final passes:
pass 1 @ .25mm at 1500mm/m 70% step over
pass 2 @ .25mm at 1800mm/m 90% stepover , sometimes slower on last pass just got gauge what the timbers doing , just jog it down max of 30 % any slower and tool starts to bite in
that seems to give it a good finish
that was redwood slab I surfaced just before xmas, pretty sure that was last pass, and that slab was a pain due to all the compression , it wanted to tear out so much. i normally surface redwood at 1mm per pass , could only manage .5mm passes
Thats after last pass
the lines that are visible, top left are barley there , took less that 20min to run over with 220g on orbital and they were all gone
do agree with using surfacing tool only cutting in one direction, just got make sure it is cutting in the right direction to the timber or its going make a hell of a mess
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