Just finished building my XL, Newbie perspective

CNC Machines Shapeoko
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Here she is. My XL, just built, has not cut anything but I’ve run the Hello World with a sharpie (My son wanted to color it in).

I mounted a new 3/4" waste board to the included waste board with 4x 1/4" pan head machine screws. I used a regular countersink drill bit to drop the screw heads down below the surface of the MDF. Used a washer and nut to secure each screw to the bottom of the included MDF.

I bought 50 threaded inserts on amazon and made a 5x10 grid. I had to experiment on some scrap MDF with different bits, depths, countersinks before I came up with something that worked well. I’m going to 3D print some clamps out of PETG tonight.

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It took me about 2 days, 4 hours each day to build the machine. I really took my time and didn’t rush anything. I ran into a few problems but was able to solve ALMOST everything.

  1. First mistake was that I installed the Y axis extrusions on the wrong sides. So the electronics box was on the right side. That set me back about an hour after I was done cursing.

  2. The right hand Y axis stepper motor cable did not reach the electronics box after removing “12” links from the drag chain. I ended up removing around 16-18 links to get the cord to reach. This still gave the drag chain plenty of slack.

  3. When attaching the included sharpie to the router mount (for hello world), you have to lower the Z axis way way way down to touch the paper. The belts slipped a few times and I had to re-tighten it. When you actually install the router it doesn’t put nearly the strain on the belts/springs because the router is about 2x the length of the sharpie. I feel like I almost had to over-tighten the Z axis belt just to run hello world.

  4. My only problem. My homing switches are not being detected at all. I enter $22=1 and have looked at everything for quite awhile. When I hit “info” it the software it says I don’t have homing switches installed. Any ideas?

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  1. you could have just removed the gantry and turned it around — just remove the 4 eccentric V-wheels at the bottom of the plates

  2. I think that number is for older kits before motor lead lengths changed

  3. You’ll be glad of the greater tension and may have to increase it yet (careful not to bend the motor shaft)

  4. This also needs to be enabled in Carbide Motion preferences — not sure why it doesn’t parse the sent commands and toggle this when that command is sent.

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You may need to wake up the micro switches by manually pressing them several times. I had the same issue at first. Seems like the internal contacts need a little help.

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