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@sketch42: I’ll give that a shot and see. I think the MDF should be flat enough to engrave without noticeable shallow spots, so I’ll likely have to do a bit more fine tuning.
@DonDespain Later next week I’ll be able to work on the X-Carve more. I’ll get out the calipers and measure everything. The attachment point for the end plates should offer enough slop to account for any leveling, though fine tuning that sounds like a bit of a headache and also not very precise. I was hoping a more elegant leveling solution was accounted for in the design of the machine, but the silence from Instructables on this subject (where they are normally super responsive) would suggest this was something that got overlooked.
Sounds Good. My thinking on the planarity of the waste board is just that you want to work up from the base seeing as any tuning you do to the machine will reference it. Like @DonDespain says, starting with a level and planar bench top to set or even lock down the machine to is a good start. Then checking that there is no warp in the surface of the waste board is my next check… If your MDF has warped in any way, then the machine it is bolted to will probably want to warp as well. Once you find that it is level and planar the rest will flow from there, and measuring as Don says with calipers off of the surface will hopefully do the trick.
Just as a side note, I have noticed a warp in my MDF waste board after measuring (1.60mm at the lowest point). I will have to account for that as well. Probably due to the current weather changes here in NZ.
Sketch try loosening all screws attached to the extrusions and let it sit overnight, Then tighten the middle screws first, then go down parallel sides alternating from one side to the other. Perhaps its the aluminum and the nuts pulling on each other helping contribute. Just a hunch.
Hi @VexFX sorry it got lost in all the other posts. I just saw it. The official word so to speak is leveling is not part of a typical router design and wasn’t specifically designed into X-Carve. The best way to do leveling is to fly cut a secondary board when your work needs to be perfectly level.
Here’s a video of someone fly cutting a waste board on a different machine.
For fine work I understand that milling a secondary waste board perfectly level is routine, but you should at least be able to adjust the primary waste board to the point where cuts are not visibly or significantly off level.
Getting things at least roughly level has been easy on other routers I’ve worked with, at least to the point where activities like engraving are not noticeably shallow/deep in areas.
In my case I would not even be able to use the threaded inserts or clamps that are part of the waste board provided with the kit, as it is currently so far off level that even basic sign engraving looks off. So I would only be able to use the machine with a secondary waste board that permanently covers the entire work surface, which would also reduce work material height.
I’m going to try taking the machine apart (again) and see if I can get it a bit more level by manually adjusting the end plates, but I’m really disappointed that the design of the X-Carve did not take even rough leveling into consideration. Maybe it’s just my good fortune that I’ve never encountered any type of CNC machine (3d printer, router, laser, etc) that did not account for leveling.
Have a few issues with this myself as I’m using very thin (0.3 - 1mm) copper and brass sheet.
My spoil board seems consistent when measured but if I home a blunt tool to the surface at 0,0 and move by hand to 300, 300, feeler gauge says 0.68mm.
As the screws holding the board to the cross rails are only just long enough, shimming has been fun but got there in the by backing off the screws half a turn and getting folded paper under there. It’s now very close.
All I need to do now is cut a secondary spoil board and skim that. Did that with a small piece of MDF yesterday and seems to work well while doing 0.1mm depth engravings on copper.
Look into the autoleveling feature from Chilipeppr. Because you’re working with a conductive material, you can probe a grid of test points on your material and Chilipeppr will compensate for warping and angularity by distorting your g-code to match. Check this out.
Yeah, but at the same time if you’re leveling wood you could increase the probing feedrate so that it overshoots and hits the wood for sure. It might be a few thousandths of a millimeter off if you’re doing softer wood and the bit presses into the material, but John’s shown that faster probe feedrates often cause visible overshoot. I’m sure you could mess with the feedrate + end mill bits (larger surface area, less error pressing into the material) to get a very accurate probe data set.
Could you use a small piece of pcb board and just move it around to different points on the bed. Seems like you could build a map of the “hills and valleys” in the bed and then use that to adjust the z movement. I know the printrbot 3d printers do this automatically, as opposed to physically leveling the bed.
The board that came with my X-Carve was a joke. I got my machine from the UK dealer called robot-something and instead of the original one with the markings on it (and the correct height) I got one that they had produced locally. I know that it makes sense to not ship something as simple as a sheet of MDF from one part of the world to another, but I really wish they had told me this beforehand because I would’ve opted to not get it at all then. It wasn’t the correct thickness, the cutouts for the screws on the side of it were cut too deep so I had to shim the screws when mounting it. What a mess… Wrote the company and complained and they didn’t bother doing anything about it or even reimburse me for some of the cost. What I’m going to do is get some lengths of 1560 extrusions with t-slots and use that as my base.
