So I’ve gotten more into the new house, as in it’s just called “The House” now, and where I was living is “The Old House”. I’ve been doing a bunch of house work lately, but have finally been putting some effort into “The Shop”, which has brought me back here. I’ve gotten my dust collection worked out well, gotten the SuperPID working well, and I can now say without the leveling feet, laying on rubber mats, the XXL noise is tolerable, meaning I can have decent conversation in my shop without screaming. Part of that is adding the little Fein vacuum, super quiet. Another part is being able to tweak router speed on the fly. I know there’s a bunch of great formulas, and Gwizard, which I own, but I’m pretty old school and if a cut “sounds” wrong, it usually is. Case in point, the other night I was cutting some MDF brackets to hold my dust hose. I did the GWizard, dialed in the speed on the SuperPID, started cutting and it all was going well until I started cutting some full engagement deep slots. I could hear the squeal of the 1/4" bit, I gave the speed pot a slight twist, upped the RPMs by less than 1000, and the squeal went away. I suspect if I was running CM4 I could have slowed the feed a hair and gotten a similar result.
So to give some results, albeit non-scientific and opinionated:
A big part of the noise was the shop-vac I was using, and I also cleaned up the ducting, shorter and smoother (hoses make a racket, just usually hard to hear over the shop-vac).
A second big part of my shop noise was probably my rookie use of speeds and feeds. I’ve ran manual machines for a life time, machines that run themselves are somewhat baffling to me. In the past if I was running a drill press, or the Bridgeport, or even the big manual lathe at work, if it “sounded” wrong, I adapted, but very rarely actually took a look at what I had the RPMs set at. This is something I’ll definitely have to learn more of to be effective at CNC.
Does the rubber mat under the machine make it quieter? I’m not sure, but I never had the stock leveling feet on my machine to begin with, I had them up on rubber isolators from the beginning, but I like to think the mat helps.
I know the XXL in general is, using my calibrated ears (Yes it was a recent cal, I have the sticker on my forehead), it is easily 40% quieter with everything in place, I’m quite pleased. I can run the machine at night in my attached “Shop” and I don’t worry about waking the kids (bedrooms adjacent to the “Shop”). I wont be making an enclosure, which is what I’ve been trying to avoid all along.
Bed flatness…I picked up a fresh plank on 3/4" MDF yesterday and got it cut to size. I removed the stock waste board today and realized something. With the machine flat on the rubber mat, and no support on the ends, the straps actually sit higher than the ends. It makes sense because the straps have the strengthening bends lengthwise, and the original design with the leveling feet would have supported the ends and kept the straps up off the table. So now I’m wondering if I should shim up the end plates to match the level of the straps before adding the new waste board? Thoughts? Musings? See attached photo of what I’m describing, screw is in place just to hold position and not relevant in photo. Seems like a lot of weight supported on the end plates if I leave them just floating in space, but the end plates are pretty robust. To shim or not to shim, this is the final question?
Thanks,
Dan