I am grateful to William Adams and others for detailed summaries with screen shots illustrating how to make replacement waste board slats on this machine. I cannot wrap my head around those methods. I am too old and not smart.
My shop is minimal w/o a table saw. I have an older, Chicago/Harbor Freight circ. saw, older mitre saw.
I feel my only option for replacing these slats is to find a shop near me that would cut the (10 ) 40" x 3" x 3/4" mdf slats with precision using a commercial table saw or other machine.
I am really frustrated because my waste board slats are in bad shape because of my inexperience using the CNC for my first few months.
I really do not want to buy a table saw at this point.
Why not just buy a suitable sheet of MDF, break it down in half (either having the home center cut it, or doing so w/ your circular saw), then use a factory edge as a guide to make a guide which is designed to clamp to the stock and then make exactly the width covered?
If you also get a 4x8 sheet of insulation that makes it feasible to do the cuts on pretty much any suitable surface.
Or, if you’re buying a tool, get a track saw?
Alternately, the home center might be willing to make multiple cuts to the specified width — pull one and take it in? Then you’d only need to drill the holes/countersinks and you could use one of the originals as a template.
Perhaps there’s someone near you in Delaware who could cut some?
make a circular saw guide like the following… I added a patches of 220 grit sandpaper on the bottom of mine to keep it from sliding without having to use clamps.
Recently there was thread about cutting rough lumber. The thread was asking about using a Shapeoko to carve outdoor bench backs. Someone (maybe Will Adams) suggested laying the piece at 45 degrees across the bed and could cut much longer stock than front to back or side to side. So if you could rough cut the slats with the circular saw you could cut the screw holes and a contour of the slat one at a time. As @FlatBaller suggested a shooting board would make breaking down large sheets easier. I have an 8’ long shooting board and I use a 1" piece of rigid insulation foam to lay on the floor and cut plywood up into manageable sheets to trim to final dimensions on the table saw. By rough cutting the slats and laying them at 45 degrees you could oversize the slats and cut them to exactly the sizes needed.
One caution. I am not familiar with the Pro XXL but some Shapeoko machines every slat is not the same size. So be sure to measure the existing slats and make them the sizes you need. Here on the forum there are measurements for the slats for all the Shapeoko machines if you look.
Good Luck.
Edit: I just turned 69 and when younger I could lift a sheet of MDF no problem. Now I have to cheat and move it other ways. So if you have any problems lifting the heavy sheets just pay Lowes or whoever to just cut it for you. Then you can handle the smaller pieces easier over moving a whole sheet of mdf.
Also if you do decide to get a shooting board made and the foam make sure your blade can cut through the material and about 1/4" into the foam. Make sure you do not cut through the foam into the floor.
Also, the slats don’t have to be perfect, nor fill the complete width if the t-tracks wont move. The main goal is to fill as much space for your work to lay on in a way that it can be secured for milling.
Don’t be hard on yourself, the wasteboard is called that for a reason. All mine have had many scars over the years.
The good news is that you don’t have to be too precise. As @FlatBaller pointed out you have some wiggle room on length and width. You can also take a used slat and a center punch to the new slats to get the hole positions. I have done that and used a forsner bit in the drill press to get the counterbores, then followed with a normal twist drill to complete the thru-hole.
I should have thought of that center punch idea. I measured and set stops. I also used too tight of a tolerance on the smaller hole and a couple didn’t line up as nicely as the should have with holes in the t track table. I will use that next time I replace.
Another option would be to do what I did, buy a peice of mdf to
make a new wasteboard with threaded inserts. Cut the mdf to the size of your work area and use your machine to make a series of holes for the threaded inserts. Then you just screw your new wasteboard into the existing slats and you’re good to go.
