Opendesk hot desk in 12-13 hours!

Dear community,
My experience in making the opendesk hot desk using Maslow…
First of all its a very densely packed one full sheet of plywood 4x8 of layed out parts. Every leg is to be glued from two pieces so it is thicker afterall, besides there is a side covered with another straight piece. In the middle it has a box for keeping cables of your chargers or just some random stuff.
Cutting time - so far 11h 25min and I am missing last of the eight leg pieces, and one little repetitive element for the box that need to be recut, therefore i estimate total of no more no less than 12-13 hours, using 3/4" or 18mm plywood and step down of 0.16" at a time. The sides are chamfered under an angle so I did cut out some additional grooves to facilitate the sanding, that I do manually and then sanding with Makita sander so get a nice finished smooth.
My observations and worth learning:

  1. First of all you can’t cut entire sheet to its ends so I prepared the file in 3 parts. Oddly the DXF had do be converted to SVG in convertio site and when opened in makercam.com it was way too small. I draw an extra line in the bottom of every file that i know how long it is so I calculate the scale factor until I get it back to real scale again. I needed 1100 to 1300% increment in scale for my files. Knowing that maslow is not precise in the sides or tops or bottoms, it also may just stop there for loosing tension or whatever reason, so I moved the media (plywood) to half right so it would be cutting the first file in the middle of the working area. Then move the media again to the left and cut the remaing pieces. Finally the opendesk did not fit anymore on one sheet of 4x8, needed some parts to be moved out of those limits where maslow does not reach still.
  2. Seems to me similar repetitive pieces if placed even within the very middle of the cutting area of 4x4 feet still come out with little differences. Read - the eight leg parts needed to be glued in pairs do not perfectly fit, so forget the drilled holes that would snap perfectly together with the wooden dowels. They are quite misaligned. I also noticed that the grooves that are in file 36mm wide, for sliding in two legs come out at 33-34mm so it is 2 millimeters too small or almost 1/8 of the inch while there are no differences in the total dimensions, this being random behaviour… so i will still need to sand off a 1/16 in of both sides of those plug and play pieces. OMG, thats laborous.
  3. my sled needs some rounding on the bottom where it touches the surface as cutting over or nearby already cut pieces it trips and starts falling or pushing itself up so drillbit goes untouching surface and the falls back in causing some damage. I figured a solution quick fix in those places placing some masking tape so it would not catch the corners.
  4. I will put heavier bricks as seems to me bottom lines horizontal tend not to be very straight, it several times deviated from the wood grooving where it wants to go by nature (like someone posted today on july 27 on FB page of maslow users).
  5. therefore - never leave machine alone even for a minute, it is i would say semi-automatic and can cause some damage if becomes out of control.
    I will keep updated about the assembly process, so far so good. Some pics for illustration below.



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  1. Never play around the cutting direction (either counterclocwise or clockwise). I noticed that changing directions makes an error in terms of other parts cut inside the same piece by up to 1 cm or almost 1/2". For example I did cut two grooves 3 and 6 mm offsetted from the finally cuttable outline for the table surface. the grooves I tried to program them to go one in one and other into another directin and they were totally totally misaligned, like maslow would not know where to calculate the coordinates so they are way off. do not change this, could be also reason why repetitive pieces come out slightly different, not only because of their location on the material being top or bottom, left or right.
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Can you run the accuracy test and report what the score is for your machine?

when you change the weight on the sled, you will need to re-do the calibration.

It sounds as if your machine is off a fair bit

cutting direction should not be making a difference, that’s a new report

About the slots beeing too small, i had the same problem. Did you enter the bit diameter on the package of the bit, or did you actually cut a slot to see what the actual cut width is? I found my maslow bits to cut a 6mm slot, not 1/4" (6,35mm).

That said, a story like this is good for the forums, all those beautifull finished projects make people think that they just pop out of the maslow ready to assemble, and that there is no learning curve. There most certainly is one :slight_smile:

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