I was order 1288 back in 2017. Finally, in Jan 2019 I got around to assembling and getting it running.
My first cut was going marginally fine, then it just went sideways on me:
It was Sunday night, I was out of plywood and defeated.
After a couple days of reflection on my experience, I ordered a 2’x2’x3/32" piece of slippery nylon from Mcmaster Carr, 8oz of Loctite epoxy from Amazon and a new 23/32" sheet of medium quality ply from Lowes.
So last weekend I cut this on Sunday night:
It looks so much better and the cut worked out great.
Now here we are today and I got all the sled equipment swapped over to the new sled with the slippery nylon on the bottom. I eased the top and bottom edge with a knife and Dremel.
Re-ran calibration and then…
I jumped right into my first project - a Val. Day gift for my wife!
First, try I had a power failure at ~80% - SURPRISE it lost the positional data. When I got the power back on, it assumed it was at the home position - NOPE. I did an automatic chain length thing and the dadgum thing was different by about 1/8" (3mm) give or take a little sigh.
So I measured out and found a spot on the scrap of the failed first sled that was large enough for my 12" x 16" project. Without further ado…
I popped that little chunk of the L when I was cutting the tabs free. I found it in the floor and glued it back in. Needs a little touch-up, but I think it came out pretty good.
I tried to use Fusion360 to setup the CAM paths, but the exploded font just seemed to have WAY too many facets. It just keeps failing to calculate tool paths for that thing. I ended up using inkscape wrote the text in 3 objects, moved them around, then popped them out to paths, turned off the fill and exported to SVG. Opened up MakerCAM and it had no problem generating the profile cuts I needed.