Thinking about surfacing my stock wasteboard because it’s pretty far out of level… But I use the mm grid lines for squaring up my projects.
Once I surface I will lose these lines. How do you guys square your projects?
Yea if you surface it you will lose the lines. You could put a thin layer of MDF down on top of it and then surface that. If you didn’t go all the way to the edge you could keep the tick marks.
1 Like
That’s what I have done.
For squaring, I mostly don’t have a problem because I have been using stock that is larger than what I am cutting, so the machine can do that. On the surfaced board I have on top of my MDF, I have cut dowel holes. I then put matching holes in my stock to make placing and flipping it easier.
One thing you could do is to use your machine to cut a perfectly straight and square rectangle of stock, and cut a hole in each end just large enough to tightly fit a dowel. Then glue some dowels in. Any time you need a square edge, you can just make matching holes in the top board (the one you have surfaced), insert your piece with the dowels, then place and clamp your stock against that.
I found it more difficult to align my grid lines to the machine than it was to use the machine to define the gid lines. I’d follow Angus’s advice and carve light reference marks into the wasteboard.
Great idea. I give it a try and see how it goes! Thanks
Shouldn’t be too hard to rig up a pen mount and draw lines instead of cutting them.
Not sure what pen would be best for MDF though.
If you put on a secondary wasteboard, you can square projects up against the edges of the pocket you cut to make your wasteboard level to your spindle. That’s how I did it. If you’re interested, I made a video showing how I did it and put it in the maintenance video thread: X-Carve Maintenance/Troubleshooting Videos - Add Your Own! - #8 by RobertA_Rieke
1 Like