Shapeoko 4 Standard Bed Flattening

[Smorgasbord (Ben)]

Cool. I just did this for the 3rd time on my Pro Standard, but used Carbide Create, which has its own issues. You can read that story here:

Shapeoko 4 Standard Wasteboard Slat Cut File?

I just went through this - again - with my Pro (4) Standard. It’s complicated, and the way I did it involved a tablesaw and bandsaw, so it’s not for everyone, but here it is: First thing, at least with my machine, was to re-establish the cutting boundaries. Mine came setup with 445 for X and 444 for Y. That was 6.5mm smaller than I can cut in X, and 8mm too big for what I can cut in Y, which led to problems with some jobs. Here’s the procedure I went through to establish the cutting boundaries…

I also put in a Feature Request for Carbide Create to have a built-in project for spoilboard flattening, you can vote for it here:

CC Feature Request: Built-in Spoilboard flattening project

Given that everyone needs to flatten their spoilboard when new, and periodically afterwards, I think it’d be great if Carbide Create contained bulit-in projects with Design and Toolpaths for flattening using the Carbide 3D McFly cutter. One issue many users run into, I suspect, is that the BitSetter takes up a piece of the bed area, and so the flattening job needs to take that into account to not mill the BitSetter. This can be hard to do, not just for people new to CNC, but new to Carbide Crea…