I am on the verge of getting my Maslow up and running. It is set up in a mostly unheated basement. With New England winters the way they are can anyone give me insight into how the cold will affect my machine? Will I need to keep a space heater going all winter or just do a preheat before operation?
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There’s very little about the Maslow that will be affected by the cold. The things I can think of are:
- the lubricants could get more viscous (chain is where this might matter), and
- the change in temperature would make the machine shrink a bit. Don’t know if it would be significant enough to affect the calibration, so let’s run some numbers. If you have a 10’ unistrut crossbar with a coefficient of expansion α = 6e-6 /F (a typical number that I just pulled from my…memory) and a change in temperature from 65 to 20 F, the change in length is ΔL/L = (1 + αΔT)^2 which yields ΔL = 0.065", about a sixteenth of an inch. That sounds like it might throw things off, although all the other metal parts would shrink at about the same rate. Assuming this is indeed a problem, you would either have to preheat the room for long enough to warm up the metal parts, or recalibrate for cold weather.
The router should work fine in the cold.
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I’ve used mine in the shed at minus 10 centigrade. Seemed to be fine to me.
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I used mine in the garage in winter here in Montana; worked fine with temps in the garage around 30-35 F. It never got colder than that in my garage.
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I used mine in an uninstalled cargo trailer all last winter. I’m located in the Boston area myself, so very similar latitude to yourself. I can’t remember what the coldest it was this winter, but it was regularly in 10-30 deg out there. I sure was cold, but the machine didn’t mind.
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