I am attempting to flatten my waste board and am not entirely sure I am doing it correct. I found a file on cut rocket Shapeoko Pro + 4 XXL Flattening File - CutRocket but am confused what to set things to. trying to figure out the center seems to take it between two waste boards. When I opened the file there are not notes. I have the 1/4 shank mcfly and moved it to the center of the waste boards as best I could, I then did the paper method for Z and when I hit start, it came to the front of the machine and I hit STOP as I though based on the preview it was going to start in the middle. Also how do you exclude it hitting the bitsetter in the front right corner? Any assistance appreciated. I am trying to flatten a bamboo cutting board that I engraved and put epoxy into. When I ran the McFly on a test piece it seems like the Z is not consistent as the test piece was thinner on one side than the other
The center of your physical spoilboard is not the center of the usable spoilboard. The back of the spoilboard cannot be reached by the router.
The BitSetter must be disabled and removed to avoid hitting it.
To do your surfacing make pencil marks all over your spoilboard. Then make a pass of your flattening file and look at the spoilboard. If there is still pencil marks then find a place where the spoilboard was surfaced and reset your Z zero there and run your flattening file again. If all the pencil marks are gone you are through. If pencil marks are still present re-zero and run the file again. Repeat until all pencil marks are gone. There will be a small ridge at the back where the router cannot go. That could potentially cause issues if you use tiling. Additionally you could have the same ridge on the right and/or left sides. The right side there is nothing that can be done because that represents the homing position. The left side you can increase the X direction by editing the shapeoko.json file. That procedure is documented here on the forum. Just dont increase the X direction so much that the router crashes into the side rail.
Mark your BitSetter position and reposition it after the flattening. You should rerun the setup in case you are slightly off in your position of the BitSetter. If you re-run the setup the edit of the shapeoko.json file is lost because setup will rewrite that file. So if you want to keep the extra X steps copy the shapeoko.json file and keep it or re-edit the file. Each time you edit the shapeoko.json file you have to power down your SO4 and reinitialize. The shapeoko.json file is only read when CM is started. So power off Shapeoko and restart CM.