I’m considering making a setup where I could lay down an 8ft long piece of material, then move the XXL over it in order to do some large tiling projects. Has anybody else done this? In order to have enough room to move an 8ft piece of material through the XXL and reach all sides, it’s close to 14ft of space. If I leave the material in place and move the machine, then I can get that down to 11ft of space. I wish I could find some example of someone doing this.
Perhaps lining up registration marks would be more difficult? I was thinking of putting the XXL on rigid casters and making a track so that the machine can only move in one direction.
Anybody who has done tiling, have any thoughts on this method?
I’d imagine if you’re cutting an 8ft piece, you don’t need PCB level of precision. I’d just set up a fence which will index the right or left edge and use a registration hole and pin or just a pencil mark on the fence. Move anything however you want and just keep that edge and that pin or mark.
You get bonus points if you automate the whole thing though.
I’m planning to tile with my XXL. Hunted through other CNC sites to read discussions from other software/machine users who do this regularly. Other software than Create are better set to handle this method. Check out several YouTube videos that show how to do this.
Doing it by moving the machine instead of the materials sounds to me like a huge effort. Moving the material only requires establishing reference points inside your design that then map to your machine bed at the start. Depending upon how many times you need to index your stock to complete the project, its a pretty obvious technique to execute with precision and ease. So for eight feet of stock, you’d probably index about three times on an XXL.
Moving the material is a lot easier, for sure. I just don’t have the room for the material to feed in/out on both sides. Very small shop in Hawaii, so have to make the most of the space I have.