I’m still putting the finishing touches on my xCarve. Last night I drilled holes for hold down clamps and today decided it was time to tackle getting a grid onto it. I wanted the grid to cover the machinable area on the board, not be offset. Therefore some of the sharpie holders already on the forum wouldn’t work. I made the following donuts sized to friction hold a sharpie and then be secured in the mount for my DeWalt router.
I tried publishing the design, but don’t see how to find the published version. Hopefully the shared version here works.
Then I tried several things to make the grid in both easel and vcarve. These were all bouncing the machine all over the place and was going to take several hours to draw everything because it was raising and lowering the marker at the end of every line, only drawing left to right, etc. Finally I gave up and hand coded a gcode file. This starts at 0,0 and draws a line from left to right, moves up 1/2", draws from right to left, moves up 1/2" again, repeating until it drew 61 horizontal lines. Then I had it draw 61 lines in the Y axis starting at 30,30 and working back towards home. Here is both the holder and the grid.
I ended up going through 3 markers as the MDF surface kept grinding the tips off of the markers. Therefore I had to keep pressure down on the marker, which made it slightly loose in the holder. You can see how some of the lines are not quite even because of this. Hopefully attaching the gcode file here will allow downloads.
lines hand coded.gcode (2.8 KB)
When I replace the waste board, I’ll probably break the file up so I can replace the sharpie more often as well as start at 0,0 for both sets of lines.
Happy xCarving.
–Rick