After lots of internal debate and struggle to find room in the shop, I decided the M4 was a perfect excuse to build a new multipurpose woodworking bench. I have yet to build the base of the workbench (it’s currently sitting on the top of my existing bench), but the top is complete, and is an astounding success for the Maslow! I just finished calibration and it passed with a fitness of 1.5!
I initially broke a belt while attempting calibration, so I decided to try setting up the bench to accommodate the broken belt. The arms have inner blocks for the anchor bolts set around 4ft from center, and outer blocks just over 7 ft from center.
Using the outer anchor points the frame dimensions are 3630mm x 2480mm (12ft x 8 ft). The workbench itself clocks in at a size of 6ft 2in x 3ft 2in.
After reading about some people experiencing issuing with frame flex, I decided it would be prudent to strap down the arms to prevent this. The final frame will have a more elegant solution then ratchet straps, but they served the purpose for now.
Using the outer block for calibration gave me a fitness of 1.5, while using the inner blocks gave me a fitness of 1.17.
Time to finally move on to finishing the workbench base and to putting the Maslow to work!
The arms are there because of my tendency to over-engineer things and make things more complicated then necessary
I wanted to make sure that whatever size spoiler board ends up on top of the bench would have all the support it might need. I don’t think they are necessary in the end. I also have some cool ideas of how to use the slots for the arms to support removable add-ons to the table such as a laptop stand, or little drop tray for the workbench dogs.
I’ll post more pics of the workbench as the rest of it comes together.
When you calibrated and got a fitness of 1.5, was the grid a 9x9? And was it on the surface of the workbench (anbout 3x6’) or was it done on a 4x8’ spoil board? I’m wondering if the really good fitness results are because the calibration area is a little smaller than the normal 4x8’ spoilboard most people are calibrating on.
It might be interesting to repeat it on a 4x8 spoilboard with the grid size normally used for that, to see what you’ll get. If you decide to cut up a 4x8 I guess you’ll have to recalibrate anyway.
Yep, the fitness definitely will be lower with a larger calibration area. I’m thinking that it may really be more of a curve of accuracy the further from the center you get, and where it starts being a real problem is probably in the white or red area of dlang’s frame worksheet
After a couple of weeks of hiatus for work and a canoe trip, I finally found time to get back to the maslow.
The larger calibration surface did lower the overall fitness, but it’s still very acceptable.
I ran 2 calibrations with a 9x9 grid, width of 2000 and height of 1000.
The first calibration kept the ratchet straps on the arms and returned a fitness of 0.65. The second calibration was without the straps and returned a calibration of 0.59. It seems that the straps me that the straps make a difference, but not significant.
Time to finish the bench and start cutting! (In 3 weeks when work allows me free time )
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