Thanks for confirming my thoughts and sharing your method, @Julien!
I measured ~0.012-0.014" on the right front after pulling forward and letting it rebound. This is also affected by v-wheels I found (tightened I think resists it expressing it’s true amount).
Regarding loosening the wheels, maybe I should have clamped one side so I could shove on the other, but I was holding one side of the rail and using my body/elbow to push on the halfway point of the x-beam to try and force the other side back to open up the gap and found that extremely difficult. I ended up with a soda can + double folded foil (and probably need 1-2 more foil layers).
I don’t think this is the exact thread I saw, but one of the ones I found in my searching mentioned loosening the wheels to shim. After finding it near impossible to get my shim to go in easily (edges of fil catching, going in on top, not being able to wiggle it in at the bottom), this trick made shimming waaaayyy more feasible by opening up a gap.
I’ll revisit this when the z-pro comes in, but were I keeping the stock mount I could look at shimming the router plate itself.
Totally true re. “good enough.” I have been trying to machine chess pieces 4-6 up and found that after flipping, the step between the halves was increasing. During my forensics studying of the block, I noticed that the very bottom looked much better if not reversed in the step direction to the head of a pawn, which is why I thought my angle was off. It might not be that… but I figured since I was pausing doing fun things and servicing the machine, I might as well never have to worry about this again.
I think it should be reasonable to have a solid method to get to:
- square base frame (mine was ~1/16" or less off. Now it’s aligned as well as I can measuring diagonals with a tape measure and retightening the waste board to the struts)
- parallel y-rails: my assumption is that even if x isn’t perpendicular, one will still get parallel y-axis rails as the length of the x-axis is fixed
- level y-rails: I think mine were already pretty good, but I did measure from the top of the rail to a block of wood on the wasteboard with a caliper this time and was able to remove maybe a max difference of 0.3mm I saw between them.
- perpendicular x-rail: shimming should be reasonable, minus the frustration I’m seeing in loosening wheels, shimming, and then seeing that my perfection goes to hell in re-tightening v-wheels
- tramming: for the first time… I had two opposing sides of my wmoy poor man’s tramming insert touching? I was quite perplexed by this and thought it was due to y-axis height mis matches? High front right/back left? I had a ~18in diameter on my poor man’s indicator and am maybe off by 0.2-0.3mm based on rubbing.
I’ll take some pics of my current gap and one of the chess pieces in a bit.