If you loosen off (just enough) the four bolts holding the X rail to Y plate at each end of the X rail then you should be able to get the four upper V wheels to all sit flat together.
This is a trick you may well come back to when you want to tram your spindle to vertical too.
Check out Winston Moy’s YouTube channel and his basic squaring and tramming videos, they’re a great start.
Tried that! Even if i loosen them all clearly too much, that wheel still doesnt sit flat
Please try loosening the flanged idlers as well — if that doesn’t work, let us know at support@carbide3d.com
What Will says,
Also, have you checked whether your Y rails are level with each other? If you have a long spirit level that works well.
Whats a flanged idler?? Lol
They are, and theres no gaps anywhere. I made a coaster and it worked perfectly. But then i tried to make the inlay from the file for the carbide corner square. It dug a hole too deep so the corner square os flush with the wasteboard. I can just toss some washers in there but something might be up. Also, when it went to cut the holes for the threaded nuts, it cut them a half inch high on the z axis. So it just cut air, it cut not nearly deep enough. But it cut the shape out too deep. Weird. Then i tried sticking a 1/16" bit in there to try something else (i bought some cheaper bits to learn on). I set a toolpath to do .5mm per pass and it stuck into the wood and instantly snapped off. I took the broken piece and measured the hole it made and it was approximately 7mm deep. No kidding it snapped lmao. So either somethings up with my machine or im truly misunderstanding things. Odd part is the coaster cut out absolutely perfectly.
The flanged bearings the belt rides on to make the turns up to and down from the pulley.
EDIT: 3 points define a plane, so it’s sort of workable, but not optimal, and not something we want to happen — if loosening all the hardware and resettling all the parts — I’d suggest starting with the gantry — and then systematically tightening things doesn’t get things trued up let us know at support@carbide3d.com
Did you get in touch with support and get your machine sorted yet?
I did get in touch, they recommended I try adding an additional wasteboard because maybe my Z axis was bottoming out and losing track of where the zero was. I don’t know how low it can go before it loses track though. When jogging and finding zero, does the Z value need to stay positive? Because right now with the added wasteboard, if I lower my bit to the wasteboard the value for Z is -0.6
I’m unsure how to tell if that’s high enough or not! I don’t want to run the carbide square program until I’m sure it won’t mess it up. hahah
Okay so I just stuck a wasteboard on top of the base one. It’s only 3/4" but I think that might be enough.
I stuck a test piece of wood on top of that wasteboard and ran the carbide corner square test on it. It worked good.
Then I took that piece off, lowered the zero down to my new wasteboard and tried to run it again. The router went over to the right spot but tried to cut way too high, so it was cutting air. (it was cutting around 0 z height on Carbide Motion) I’m assuming this means I need to put a third board on top? The weird part is that when I did the test piece on top of the wasteboard, it routed out the screw holes in it and it dropped below z 0 to make those, but now it won’t go below z 0 for this part. And before I put the wasteboard on, I cut out some coasters just fine and those must have been way below z 0.
Do you have the Z-Plus on that machine or the belt driven standard Z axis?
Did you manage to get all four (eight) of the V wheels on the X axis endplates to ride properly on the Y rails yet?
As for the co-ordinates. When the machine initialises it homes top back right and that becomes the machine zero, it now knows where it has stepped to from the point where it triggered the home switches.
You then have the workpiece co-ordinates where you jog the machine around or use the probe to set your working co-ordinates which is what CC shows you as X, Y, Z. The machine remembers the difference between that (0, 0, 0) and it’s internal (0, 0, 0).
The reason for all that was that, yes, your working position can easily be negative in all three without causing an issue;
There’s mine just forward, left and down from the rapid “Center” position where I said “Set Zero”.
What causes an issue is if you move outside of the physical range the machine can move to, the motors will try to turn, make a nasty cogging grinding sound because they can’t step and the machine will lose it’s place because it believes that it has moved but the motors couldn’t.
I’d want to get the Y plate V wheels sorted if they aren’t yet.
How are you setting the X, Y, Z zero for these jobs? Bitzero, manually?
Are your cutting jobs set to cut down from the Z=0 top of your stock?
Hey so I have the Z Plus! All 8 wheels seem to be sitting and moving with it.
I don’t think I’ve heard any nasty noises when it’s going up or down so I think we’re good there.
Let me know if this is an operator error. I open Carbide motion, initialize machine, then I load up a file. I click jog and jog the machine over to the zero point in carbide create. (In this case, it’s the bottom left of the carbide square wasteboard cutout)
I jog down the Z axis and have it sit jusssst above the material (material is the wasteboard here)
Now the bit is touching the material and its right where I want the job to begin. I click Zero all and all the numbers set to 0. I click start job, it goes to the middle front, asks me to put in the bit (its already in), I click resume, it auomatically goes over and taps the bitsetter, comes back, asks me to turn on the spindle, i do, and i hit ok, and it goes.
Is this correct?
Ah, you have a bitsetter.
That is something I don’t have but I have seen quite a few threads where people get the workflow one step wrong and things go weird, not doing the initial probe when the machine starts up before setting the zero is one of those, I think.
It would be good to ask somebody who knows how the bitsetter works …
To check if you’ve exceeded the travel range you can go back to zero and visually inspect to see if your co-ordinate zero is still where you set it;
If your Z is now negative with the bit in the same position you set “Zero All” in then either bitsetter got it’s offsets confused or you ran out of Z travel. I would expect you to hear and notice the nasty grinding missed steps noise though.
I’m just getting used to all the steps so I assume I was doing something wrong because I just followed the steps I wrote out myself and set the job and it just routed out the carbide square slot perfectly. There’s a good chance I put the bit at the right height, then forgot to hit set zero! Lol.
Thanks for your help. What do you think of the Bitzero? Also that addon that apparently controls the spindle for you? Does that mean at the end of jobs itll turn your router off for you and skip the step of asking you to turn the spindle on, itll do it automatically?
And for the bitzero, how’s that work? Looks like it has a little nook and I guess you hang it on the corner of your material and make sure your origin zero on the file is set to that corner and it calculates the exact xyz of your piece?
That’s great, hopefully it was just a workflow error, have a search for bitzero on the forum here and you’ll find a few threads where people discuss the specific sequences.
@Julien is there an e-book section or reference post on bitsetter workflow?
I’ve been quite tempted to buy one to avoid having to re-zero every time I change bit in a complex job. I haven’t yet so I can’t comment on how well they work.
The bitrunner? I have a VFD controlled spindle so not tried it, anyone else got feedback?
I gather they are a one-time manufacturing thing though so if you want one, buy one before they run out. Search bitrunner on here and there’s a few threads.
On the underside it has two ledges for X and Y so yes, you put it on the front, left corner of your stock and then Carbide Motion can do an X, Y, Z probe for you and set them all in one go. You can also put it on top of the material and do just a Z probe with it.
I have one, bought it with the machine, used it loads, almost always use it for setting Z.
Your stock needs to be flat and have enough of a square corner to get an accurate position. I generally cut the front / left square on the table saw before putting the piece on the Shapeoko though to make life easy.
Yeah, I’ll generally be using this for very similar projects, that’s why I’m putting in the carbide corner square right now!
There’s lots of info here on workholding and positioning, lots of different approaches for different jobs and materials
Check out the e-book
Lots of people drill their spoilboard in a grid pattern and put the M6 threaded inserts in for workholding;
What I’ve found very useful is having the Shapeoko drill a grid of 10.1mm holes which I then stick small pieces of 10mm Aluminium rod in so that I can line up stock and parts vertical or horizontal with the machine really quickly and easily by sticking pins in the nearest holes. Make sure you tram and square your machine before doing the pin-grid though…
Sweet! I’m paranoid about having clamps that go higher on the z axis than the material, also those are clamps from the top so you can’t cut that part. Most of the pieces i use will be the same size. (Probably 14x20, maybe a few other sizes) So I was thinking of just making sure the material is slightly larger than 14x20, use 2 factory cut sides on the square and have a 2d contour toolpath cut the other two at the end of the project. Then ill be maybe routing out some slots for a track and making some sort of low profile clamps that can slide along the track and tighten down. I’ll check out that link you sent because there’s probably some good options. Cam-style clamps with a tightening knob might work fine too! Basically, speed is ideal for me. As for the grid and the aluminum rods, that’s really smart for lining up projects perfectly square without having to have a permanent square mounted!
There is a small summary about how the BitSetter works in the ebook in that section, and a variety of threads here about using correctly, which boil down to “never ever change the tool without using the “change tool” button in Carbide Motion and you’ll be fine”.
Then definitely check out the Tiger Claw clamps, they were designed specifically for side clamping. Using a corner square on one corner of the stock and two tiger claw clamps on the other two sides, and you end with a workholding solution that leaves the top of the stock completely clear of any obstacle…
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