Day 1 of assembly went without a hitch!

Since nobody posts to forums unless there is a problem, I wanted to buck the trend and report that the first day of my xcarve 1000mm kit has gone without a hitch!

I am in a situation where I don’t have the area where the xcarve will be setup yet, so I stuck to things that don’t take up the full amount of space.

  • X Carriage DONE
  • Y-Plates DONE
  • Gantry DONE
  • Y-Axis Standby (this will make the footprint huge and make it harder to move)
  • Belting X axis (gantry) done, Y axis on standby
  • Z-Axis DONE
  • Drive Rod DONE (acme threaded rod)
  • Z-Axis Motor (DONE)
  • Wiring (wired to terminal blocks on the plates, the rest is on standby)
  • Drag Chain Standby
  • Spindle Mount DONE
  • Work Area Standby (and I will be doing the T slot method instead of attaching wasteboard to the machine)
  • Electronics Standby
  • Calibrate TBD
  • Drivers TBD
  • Machine Setup TBD

I think that puts me most of the way to having the physical portion of the machine done, then I am sure a fair amount of time will be spent tweaking.

Everything so far is going great, the instructions are very helpful. The only thing that gave me ANY trouble was when attaching the Z axis to the X carraige, one of the insertion nuts would NOT thread, and when it finally did catch it cross threaded. Put that insertion nut aside, the next one threaded fine. Not sure if there are extras in the kit or not, I will find out. I assume I could get those locally, but I will have to see, getting anything metric at local stores here (in california) can be tricky. Selection is limited. Hopefully the kit came with a few extra, if not, I would suggest adding in a few extra in the future, There are very few threads on them and they can cross thread fairly easily.

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I got caught up on the Y axis. The instruction “If you have limit switches, make sure the slot on the Makerslide is oriented in the upper position. This slot is used to attach the limit switch “actuator” and will not be aligned with the switch if the Makerslide is positioned incorrectly.” With no pictures I didn’t know what slot they were talking about. And of course the limit switch actuator is like one of the last steps in the whole assembly. Of course I had it upside down and had to disassemble a bunch of stuff to fix it.

One side of the extrusion has two slots, the other side has one slot, The instruction is that the one slot side has the slot up. Unfortunately, the pictures they show have the slot in the lower direction. I actually assembled most of the Y axis and took it apart because I didn’t want to have to move it like that, worried I would bend it.