Does anyone have a wasteboard file/design for carving the holes in the wasteboard for the clamp screws?
Are you putting a secondary wasteboard over the Inventables one, or making your own? The Inventables wasteboard has holes 75mm apart, but if you’re making your own then you can do whatever spacing you like. I’d stick with 75mm or less though, so the clamps will work with them.
You should be able to make the design easily in Easel, just pick the size of hole that you want and use the replicator app to make as many holes as you want. Then select all and move their position as a group until they’re in the right spot relative to your origin (0,0).
One thing I would suggest before carving is to calibrate your stepper motors. I did mine before calibration, and ended up having to re-do it because I couldn’t get the screws into 3/4 of the holes.
Thanks! I think it’s already calibrated. I tested the motion once I got the gShield plugged in; I did 5mm increments and according the caliper, all was well.
I was going to do 100 clamp holes instead of 144 clamp holes. (10x10), but if you think that I should stick to the 75mm spacing… I might just order another bag of 100 inset screws to fill in the rest. Thanks Robert. I’ll try the Easel route.
The only reason I suggest sticking with 75mm is because the standard clamp set barely covers that distance. Any farther between holes and you either need larger clamps or you need a different workholding method.
The clamps I got from them seem to be something like red oak, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to make larger clamps if you want. The downside is that you need smaller clamps for very large workpieces that are near the edges of the wasteboard, so maybe it would be worth doing 10x10 holes and making 4 each of small, regular, and large clamps to give yourself a variety of workholding options.
That actually isn’t a bad idea. I can 3D print a few different sets of clamps at various sizes and stick with the 10x10. I doubt I will ever really be using the FULL work area, but I know I will come close. Thanks again.
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If you make a file in Easel, please share it. I can tell I am going to need to replace mine at some point and it would be preferable not to have to pay shipping on it… nice as that grid is to have!
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