Going larger than xxl?

[Marco_XXL (Marco Paselli)]

Hi all,

We are really enjoying working with our xxl, however we have already been asked to work on a projects that exceeds the Shapeoko xxl working area, and it turns out that is very easy to think big when you have an xxl.

Anyway, the stock we would like to machine is approximately the same width (x) as the Shapeoko working area but exceeds the length in y direction by a factor of 1,5 to 2.

Now my feeling is that in theory it would be possibile to machine the part in 2 setups that are rotated from each other by 180° around z axis if we used some kind of rotate jig…and we would need to support the overhanging part of the stock while machining the first part…and we would need to be careful when using the same zero location between the operations…and so on…

Is there experience in the community in doing such an athletic exercise? Is it feasible with reasonable margin for errors? Is it pure madness?

As always thanks to everyone!

Marco

[Julien]

Definitely doable, it’s called tiling, see:

https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Fabrication_Techniques_%26_Hardware#Tiling

[Marco_XXL (Marco Paselli)]

many thanks @Julien…I was only missing the search key

[FamousElementsStudio (Chris DiGanci)]

Don’t feel bad - I asked the same thing a few weeks ago because I didn’t know the word either. I kept looking for ‘indexing’.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

The community does maintain a glossary which may help for things such as this at:

https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Glossary

For Indexing it has:

Indexing To rotate or move from one position to another in order to perform a set of operations. c.f., Tiling