Squaring and Calibration of Shapeoko Pro

[LiamN (Liam Newcombe)]

At the risk of worsening your calibration OCD…

It’s quite easy to measure the belt tension so you can balance both Y axes and repeatedly set the same tension (I do it by ear now).

Measuring belt tension, squaring and calibration

A post about belt tension, how to measure it, what effect it has and why you need to manage belt tension in order to usefully calibrate and square the machine. As usual, no criticism of the machine here, in fact some quite clever design choices seem to have been made. The question of drive belt tension has been bugging me. How much you should have, how to check it and how it affects machine performance. I failed to find any quantitative data to use, so I went and started measuring; and found t…