Wow again - will take a look later today after I get the parts in glue-up. Some overnight thoughts:
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I was also thinking about hold-down options. My post is hollow, so a center hole won’t help there, but now that the center hex cut-out is a shallow pocket, I could easily drill a center hole manually and screw that into a T-nut in the track of my hybrid table. I could also “add” the tape/superglue around the edges for additional security. For cutting the wedges themselves, definitely need the tape/glue. For the center hex, since it’ll be standing up, I’ll probably screw a piece of plywood to the bottom and then clamp the plywood to the hybrid table.
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I’m thinking the new center point should be the bottom center of the main hex body. I would do this in two stages: first I’d set the Z-axis to zero at the spoilboard, or maybe a piece of paper higher. Then I’d mount the blank and zero X-Y at a pre-marked center at the top. I don’t want to zero at the top since I don’t want to have the stock thickness be a critical dimension for me to achieve.
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Routing away all that material for the main bevel seems like a waste of time, router bit wear, and dust bag. I should probably cut a rough bevel using the tablesaw - just keep it say 1/8"-3/16" away from the final surface. This means modeling the original stock to have that bevel. I’d probably model the stock to be slightly larger than I expect to manually cut the bevel and live with the tool spinning in space for a couple rounds.
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You wrote: My suggestion (awaiting better ideas from the more experienced woodworkers here) is to cut this over length and over height so that you can push it into the slot until it ‘bottoms out’ on the walls and rear face then trim the ends and finally face the surface down (with a plane or sander).
Yes, this is exactly my intention, although since an extended “rear face” is in the hexagonal pocket, my thinking was that I’d do all the milling, then, leaving the base attached to the spoilboard, glue in every other wedge, letting the rear ends stick into the hex pocket (if I did adjacent wedges they’d interfere with each other in the pocket), and then, when dry, re-cutting the hex pocket. Then do the remaining wedges, and re-cut the pocket once more. There might be some hand trimming of the wedges in the corners due to the 1/16" radius from the ⅛" end mill.
- I started another thread in the Shapeoko Pro category (Squaring and Calibration of Shapeoko Pro - #8 by greg5 ) for my machine setup adventures. I need to re-run the procedure again for the $100/$101 factors, but I think the squareness I’ve got is pretty decent (when gantry is slid forward there’s a 0.006" gap agains the end plate on one side, which is across 20" or more). I might try to re-square, but the only way I’d get better is to loosen not just all the bolts (and with the hybrid table there are a lot, but also loosen the belts (which I didn’t do last time).