Nomad 3 table replacement

What approach would people recommend if replacing the default plate, for example with a SMW plate, with regard to getting it true? I guess there is surfacing or shimming or a combination of the two. I am not aware of any adjustment points built into the machine.

The bed aligns with pins built into the Nomad, so squareness is built in and needs no extra work.

For parallelism with the X-axis, I’m not sure how it’ll work on the Nomad 3 but I’d assume the mounting surface on the bed is already parallel, so as long as the top and bottom surfaces of the plate are parallel, it should be too.

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Curious to see the responses as well - I bought a SMW plate (inch version vs metric) and love it, but have not yet gotten a good dial indicator and ensured level… yes, I’m that much of a CNC noob.

Even without that dialed in though, I’ve been pretty happy - I do mainly profile cuts in AL, and so far with an as-is piece of laser birch ply as a sacrificial plate I was less than a thickness of blue tape off level across 6" on the X axis (Removed all tape from one end of the profile, left one thickness of tape on the other end for about 2 inches). I cheated and just shimmed the ply with a layer of blue tape, which is a kludge but that’s all I needed right now. Baby steps…

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Shimming is a perfectly legit way to get things level and square. Multi million dollar machines get shimmed in many places during install/confirmation. So welcome to aerospace. :smiley:

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I’d decided I’ll need to do some “wedging” rather than “shimming”. Putting on a different (parallel) table resulted in about 24 thou slope. I check the original table (which I believe is faced at the factory after fitting to the machine) with a micrometer and it is 24 thou thinner one side than the other which makes sense.

Please check in w/ support@carbide3d.com — the table is faced after it is installed on the machine — it might be that repeating that operation is called for here, but it would be better to address the underlying cause of what should have been a change.

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