So, after a single round of calibration, I went and recut the template for the friction reducing pads and was happily surprised to find that it was dead on! I managed to get all three of the pads cut (though I had to recut the template again after the first one due to accidentally nicking it with the router, but at less than 10 minutes on the Maslow, it wasn’t a big deal) and installed over the weekend, and now the sled glides beautifully.
Daylight through the screw holes!
I decided that 9 screws was overkill and just used 5. You can see the nick in the first pad made (bottom left pad), and you might notice that there are two extra holes in the other two. I decided to change my method and screwed the template and plastic down to do the routing with a flush trim bit, which made the whole process a lot easier and faster than trying to clamp it down. The two holes have been chamfered, so they don’t catch. Here’s a quick video of flipping the template and pad to route the rounded edge and countersink the holes:
Previously the sled would tilt when moving left or right, which I had planned to counter with increased weight at the bottom of the sled, but with the new UHMWPE pads installed, it appears there is no need for the weight to counter tilt (though I did noticed that with deep cuts using a straight blade single flute cutter the bit would tend to ride up on the material a bit when moving from left to right, and I think more weight would mitigate that. As it was, I just put a finger on the bottom to counter that effect, so it shouldn’t take much more weight to correct it). I would HIGHLY recommend using something like the UHMWPE on the bottom of the sled if you find that your sled is sticking at all.
Now that I am up and running, it is so great to have an idea in the morning and a product in the afternoon! My kids have a wooden marble run kit which is great, except that we have wood floors and the marbles just spill out of the bottom with nothing to contain them. Previously I’ve been using blocks to make a pen to contain them, but I figured that I could do better, so the marble catcher was born that morning, and in use that afternoon (sorry, in the frenzied rush to use the new catchers, the marble run only lasted a few more minutes before being knocked over, so I didn’t get a picture… maybe tomorrow if we have a snow day)
There was an issue with the stock size for the cut on the left (it is a little thicker wood than the other, but I forgot to remove the extra stock that Inventor adds to parts during the CAM process, so the gcode was cutting too deeply. Fortunately a quick stop and some creative use of “Go To” saved the part, but you can see the couple spots where the router dug in. Still functional, though) so it’s not as clean a cut as the other. Both made from random scrap wood in the workshop.