Getting Back in the Game

Well if you insist… :wink:

Ignore the pile of steel in front of the Maslow. The new shop doesn’t have a cantilever rack yet, so it’s all just sitting on the floor.

I woke my Maslow up from it’s long sleep yesterday. I have to admit, I love having it in the shop. It’s so much less cramped than it was in the trailer. I spent the better part of the day just updating and recalibrating. Apparently it’s been quite some time since I last ran the machine, as I updated from v1.03 to v1.15. I moved my old groundcontrol.ini file to my backup folder and started from scratch. I ran the calibration pattern 3 times to really get it dialed in. The chain sag and rotation radius changed each time, so I know that it was doing something. I ultimately got a benchmark value of 0.917 - 0.3125, which is at least an order of magnitude better than it was last time I ran the machine. The best I got before was 1.5 - 0.505.

Quick note to the developers: Thank you so much for your continued efforts improving Ground Control and the firmware. Calibrating this time was so much easier than it has been in the past. If not for your work, I would still be struggling with accuracy. I also especially like the “new” dark blue color scheme for GC!

The main reason I needed to get the Maslow online is because it’s time for it to participate in the remodel. Last weekend we hung all the cabinets we had ready. There’s currently a hole where a sink base needs to go, and that’s the Maslow’s first project. There was also a base cabinet who’s toe kick broke moving it from my old apartment to the new house. I had to build it a new toe kick assembly, but that was easy enough to do with the table saw.

We got a sheet of 1/2" Birch ply for the new cabinet. The sheet was pricey, but it’s really good material. I am morally opposed to using particle board for a sink base. I had a little bit of trouble cutting, but nothing that would force me to remake it. Tension on the sled was pretty low at the bottom of the bed. I’m pretty sure going from my 112" top beam to a 144" (12’) Unistrut top beam will solve most of those issues. My dust hose also caught under the sled a couple of times, so I will need to add more height below the fence to keep that from happening in the future.

The router’s power cable got caught on one of the clamps at the top of the machine cutting the top of the right end. There’s a bit of a squiggle from the first pass. Luckily, I’ll probably never see it, so I’m not going to bother re-cutting it. Also, at $76 a sheet, I’m pretty determined to use anything I cut.

It was getting late last night when I finished up the ends on the Maslow. Needing to re-run the other profile of the right end didn’t help either. The good news is that I can really see the improved accuracy. These ends (minus the mistakes) were within 1/32" tolerance! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

I didn’t have time to cut the tabs and look at the parts on their own. That will be this weekend. I’ll also cut the nailers, toe kick, and deck on the table saw out of the other half of the sheet.

Bonus pictures:

Last weekend we got the wallpaper up in the living space. We actually picked our kitchen color (loosely) from the wallpaper. It’s a little more of a green blue than in the kitchen, but it still ties them together.

Cat tax (one of my cats loves napping under the bedsheets):

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