Surfacing spoilboard

[rcamber (Bob Amber)]

Now that I have built my spoilboard and mounted to my base board. Do I surface it and then tram it?

[Julien]

Definitely.
First make sure you’ll be able to reach the left/right/front/back limits of your spoilboard with your surfacing bit, by jogging manually to those limits.
Your surfacing op should cover the whole top surface of the spoilboard or your will end up with a recessed pocket.
Once that’s done, tramming your router is a good idea. There are various ways to do that floating around on the forum, here’s a simple one if you have a dial indicator:

Tramming HDZ 80mm Spindle

Depends which way you’re out of square… I decided that it was best to tram the whole Z assembly wherever possible as I would like the cutter and the Z movement axis to be aligned. When I fitted my HDZ, before putting the spindle mount on I used an engineers square to check whether the Z axis was normal to the spoilboard front / back, i.e. whether the X axis beam was rotated, it was so I loosened off the bolts on both ends of the X axis and rotated the beam in the Y gantry plates until I was ve…

Similar idea without the dial indicator in Winston’s video here:

Basic Shapeoko 3 Tuning: Squaring, Spindle Tramming, & More

[rcamber (Bob Amber)]

I’m sure I can reach all the points you mentioned, but will double check when my bit arrives.

[gdon_2003 (Guy Donham)]

Many call tram leveling the spoil board. Tramming is leveling the router mount to the bas or spoil board. You can use 123 set up blocks or dial indicators or a few other ways. After you get the router/router mount basically level to the base/ spoilboard you can level the spoilboard. Usually you use a 1 inch or larger bit to level. After you level you check for ridges and fine tune the tram and level once again. The spoil board/base may not be level in all corners and the fly cutter makes the router mount/ router and base/ spoil board be in the same plane. They are not necessarily level but coplanar.

[EngineerNate (Nathan Morris)]

When you surface a spoilboard using CC what happens if you make the program slightly larger than the working area? For instance my usable area on my machine with the t-track kit is 31.5 x 30.4 inches. What would happen if I told CC to make me a 33 x 33 inch pocket? Would it hit the limits and release it can’t go any further and continue on or will carbide motion crash from the tooling code telling it to go out of bounds?

[gdon_2003 (Guy Donham)]

There is a physical limit for X and Y. So jog your machine to the far left and set zero and jog to the right and see what your actual distance is. Do the same for the back to front. The back to front is larger because the router is designed to extend off the front of the machine so start at the back and jog to the front but not off the edge of your spoil board. When you get the actual measurements then you can design your spoilboard cutting program to cut just over the edge of the spoil board but not as far as the physical limits of X and Y.