My Shapeoko 3 XXL will not carve a straight line on X axis

[LiamN (Liam Newcombe)]

If it’s any help, I found a few hints and tricks to get my machine predicably square.

Simple mod to keep your machine square

Getting my machine to cut square and keeping it square has been frustrating me for a while. Even when I spent ages squaring up the frame the cutting squareness seemed inconsistent. So I did what any CNC user would do, modded the machine to fix it Tools required A Shapeoko Calipers A Stick (not calibrated) Optional - 3D printer, or you can use the Shapeoko The Problem(s) The first problem is that it’s pretty hard to get the frame of the Shapeoko really squar…

Measuring belt tension, squaring and calibration

A post about belt tension, how to measure it, what effect it has and why you need to manage belt tension in order to usefully calibrate and square the machine. As usual, no criticism of the machine here, in fact some quite clever design choices seem to have been made. The question of drive belt tension has been bugging me. How much you should have, how to check it and how it affects machine performance. I failed to find any quantitative data to use, so I went and started measuring; and found t…