I’ve had my standard-sized Shapeoko for about 5 months. To date, everything I’ve made has been less than the advertised 16" Y axis. Today, however, I decided to push some limits and start a new project that required the full 16"x16" cutting area of the machine.
As you may have guessed, I quickly discovered that the machine does not cut 16" on the Y axis without affixing a custom made wasteboard.
I’ll save my comments on the morals of advertising cutting dimensions that you can only get if you customize the machine yourself for another post. In the meantime, I was wondering if anyone has or can share a link to a post that would describe the best way to go about this?
Normally, I like to figure these things out myself, but I’m on a deadline and would love a jumpstart on getting the extension made. Thanks!
What are you carving? If your project is a rigid enough material, you could probably just let the last few inches hang off the front of the machine without extending the wasteboard.
Source a 16" x 16" sheet of MDF and suitable spacer material.
Secure the MDF on the baseboard with the spacer material to lift it up over the edge and the corners aligned at the rear edge of where you can cut.
Load a suitable endmill and jog it over to be centered on the left edge of the MDF and centered front–back over the edge of the front plate.
Create a pocket toolpath which will cut a slot from there to the opposite (right) edge a bit deeper than the edge of the endplate is higher than the baseboard surface
Remove the spacer material, flip the MDF over, and secure it in place.
In addition to what @Kopah stated, if you already have a supplementary wasteboard in addition to the baseboard (is that what we’re calling it?), you can add another layer. This is what I’ve done, and I’ve rarely needed the extra depth.
I am with you on that, but as you have found out, the additional inches you are missing on the front can be had by extending that bed.
The MDF that comes with your machine is not really the wateboard. Its there to provide “structural” support. On top of that you would typically install your real waterboard. When you do that make sure you offset it toward the front a bit.
