I have been thinking a while about the best way to Mirror your plug for a wood inlay project to any added (or reduced) angle to a v carve due to the v bit not being at a perfect 90 deg angle to the work surface. Yes, we can tram for hours on end to get a perfect alignment, but I’ve found that this hobbist machine doesn’t have precision adjustment nuts/screws like you would find on a commercial cnc. ( I have a shapeoko 4)
I’m wondering if it could be better to mirror horizontally, vertically and even rotate your plug (after mirroring) to reduce any small tramming issues.
I used carbide create to exaggerate a v bit not perpendicular to the work surface in the Counter Clockwise direction. It looks like the left side lines up well but the right side doesn’t have great contact.
It should be pretty straight-forward to get a Shapeoko 4 trammed and dialed-in so that it will cut mirror-imaged inlays which have a consistent glue line.
Big things are:
work from large → small — level table, level and parallel and plumb Y-axis rails, gantry level and at right-angles to Y-axis, Z-axis carriage level and plumb —if need be, adjust the mount for nod/yaw
