I ordered the Pro XXL a month ago. It shipped out a couple weeks later and then half of it got lost in transit. The rest of the machine arrived and was sitting in my garage waiting. A few days ago, customer service overnighted me a replacement Box 1, and it came in yesterday. Despite it being in their possession 2 days, Fedex had really done a number on the thing. The box had a bunch of holes in it and was ripped and taped back up when it got here.
I spent about 4hr putting the thing together. It looks like a couple parts of the hardware have changed and do not match the manual, but I made it through and got far enough to turn the machine on and drive it around a little bit last night. I used the 1-2-3 block stack when mounting the router collar.
Today I went out to see about measuring the machine and making any adjustments to get it trammed in.
I started with a digital angle gauge. The granularity is something like 0.15°. The gauge is sensitive enough to pick up a change if you lean against the table. I zeroed it on the left Y rail and then measured and that whole rail is straight. Placing the gauge at different spots along the XZ gantry, the X axis rails sit at perfectly 90°. Placing the gauge on the right Y rail, it is parallel to the left side. The Z rails, the Z mounting plate, and the router collar are all 90° to the Y axis rails. Even the MDF table is sitting at 0°. Then I zeroed the gauge out on the X axis rail. Measuring the sides of the Z axis rails, and every port of the Z working towards the router body itself, everything was perfectly square. So as far as I can tell, every single piece of this machine that is supposed to be parallel or perpendicular to something else actually is. At least, as for as this gauge can tell.
Then I pulled out the dials and indicators and commandeered a thick 20" circle of glass from the wife’s arms and crafts. I stick a magnetic base with a noga arm to the X axis and the angle gauge to the Z rail and jogged the machine all the way forwards and back. The angle gauge shows there is no twist in the Z as the machine goes forwards and back. The dial indicator shows over the entire travel of the Y, the X axis is within 0.001"
Then I put the magnetic base on the spindle with a dial test indicator. Sweeping the spindle from side to side and front to back over the glass, the 1-2-3 blocks had it lined up side to side with about 0.010" out over 18". The works out to something like half a thousands of an inch rise for every inch of run.
I’m overall very impressed with it. A unit that the end user assembles and it goes together with such closer tolerances that I cannot measure any amount of twist or sagging or slop in any of the axes or bed. The spindle tram being as close as it is without any shims or really any effort on my part is pretty good. I may still go out and try to shim some of it out just because I can.
I’d rather not be a downer, but the glass you are using only serves to be a continuous surface that is easy to probe (your indicators don’t get bumped by the wasteboard/rail segments), but not as a reference surface, either in flatness or parallelism. Additionally, it is often not stiff enough to not conform to whatever it is supporting it. You jack a significant span up up on two ends, you will get a detectable dip in the middle. It is fine for detecting gross deviations, but may not be a good reference to indicate the last say 0.0005" or 0.002".
Sorry to hear about your shipment issues. Exactly how long did the original shipment take? I am at just over a week since ordering mine and the suspense is killing me!
Ordered 1/25. A bunch of accessories like bit runner, hold down kit, and endmill kit all shipped 1/26 and was delivered 1/30. The 2 big packages for the machine itself shipped 2/10 and made it to the UPS atlanta hub 2/11. Thats where things went south. One part of the 2 part shipment kept on going and made it to my house 2/12. The other was MIA. I waited a couple days and called carbide3D. After 3 calls and 6 emails back and forth, they said they’d ship out the missing part of my order on 2/16. On 2/22 I got the email that the order had shipped. It made it here 2/23.
The tracking number for the missing box still shows that it was last seen in atlanta. Now marked “delayed”. I believe this is actual footage of the box inside the shipping hub.
The time waiting for the machine to get here gave me a chance to build my table, dust collection, get in a raspberry pi to use to drive it, and start learning the software stack. Things from Inkscape to illustrator to vcarve and carbide create.
Good info, thanks. They said 14 business days, which could be 3 weeks and still within their stated window. I ordered late on 2/18 and haven’t heard anything yet. I am guessing late this week or early next I will see something pop up. I’ve got the lumber for my table now, but haven’t built it yet. I’ll have to get that together and contribute yet another table build post to the pile.
One of my extrusions is out of spec and sits higher than the rest, I wish it was perfect, but its not. Its a router, so I cant complain too much I guess. Im just going to surface some new slats to put my fixture plates on so that I know its at least parallel to the gantry.
