First cut on the Maslow. This originally was not going to be my first cut but I was getting pretty frustrated and just wanted to see it cut something. Holes in the picture are from the failed sled cut.
1.) Could not get the router to center on the plywood. After spending a couple hours redoing everything and troubleshooting, I come to find out the I entered Inches instead of mm for the measurement from the center of the motor to the top of the plywood.
2.) I had a chain wrap when running the benchmark. The bungee string did not work that well. When the router was on one side of the board, one bungee was too loose and the other was so tight it was at the point of snapping. I ended up running counter weights off of the center pulleys and down behind the plywood(works great).
3.) When I was running the Sled cutout I got a usb connection lost error and had to re calibrate the chain links. Unfortunately I was unable to restart the cut after calibration because Ground Control closed out and lost the home position of the project.
It sounds like the bungee isnât working for the top beam frame designs and we need to re-think it. I will put out a call for new designs in the newsletter on Wednesday and we can all pick the best new design.
Get a workout band or surgical tubing and hook the two tension gears together. It keeps the chains up on at the beam level and the chains stay out of the way.
Iowa looks great! I have driven across it dozens of times.
Regarding the âlost USB connectionâ, the same thing happened to me⌠I am pretty sure the cause was my laptop going into sleep mode 60% into cutting the sled. This apparently turns power off to the USB ports, which powers down the control board and causes it to lose the positioning on the sled. l Immediately killed all energy saving features on the âplugged inâ settings of my Win 10 machine, and the error has not occurred since. Thought I had to recalibrate, but it might have been possible to use the âAutomatic Chain Adjustmentâ to get going again.
If you have a âpaint penâ or some other way to visibly mark a chain link, thereâs an even quicker trick. This one time do the âExtend Leftâ and ââŚRightâ but before clicking anything else, paint the link that is sitting at the 12 oâclock position on both sprockets. Then go on and finish. The next time you need to do a chain calibration, do the part about setting a tooth to 12 oâclock but donât extend, just âQuitâ the chain calibration. Donât worry about the warning that pops up, our next step addresses that. Look in the Actions/Advanced list for âManual ChainâŚâ . Before you click it, set the painted links on the 12 oâclock teeth. When you click the âManual ChainâŚâ button your chains will be in the same position that the âAutomatic Chain CalâŚâ puts them in before you click the âFinishâ in that calibration. As weâre doing this manually, we need to finish it ourselves, which we do by clicking the âReturn to Centerâ button on the Actions page. When that is clicked, the z-axis rises to +0.2" bad the sled moves to 0,0 on the workarea just like the automatic calibration finishes.
So Manual chain calibration is:
12 oâclock teeth
painted links on top teeth
Actions/Advanced/ManualChainCal
Actions/ReturnToCenter
All in all much quicker than the automatic calibration with a little preparation.
However, I kept my rollers in the center of top 2x4. When you have the Sled in an extreme corner the chain will hit the roller if it is off center. On the back of the plywood I put 1 roller off center so the counter weights do not interfere with each other when going up and down.
Here is the link to another post that has some nice options to think about as well
