Vertical vs Horizontal Frame? or reuse MakerMade Frame

Hardware Frame
1

I purchased as Maslow 4.1 Kit that I am just putting together. I am coming from a MakerMade M2 that I did have in operation last year. I have a standard M2 frame against my garage wall and I have 2 questions.

  1. Can I reuse my M2 Frame and use the M4 on it?
  2. If I build a new frame would it better to be horizontal or vertical like my M2 frame. I would prefer to use a sloped vertical as it saves space but if the horizontal is better accuracy and easier setup then maybe that’s the route.

Anyone thoughts and opinions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Deevo wrote:

  1. Can I reuse my M2 Frame and use the M4 on it?

Not really, the 4.1 needs a larger frame for a given size workpiece

  1. If I build a new frame would it better to be horizontal or vertical like my
    M2 frame. I would prefer to use a sloped vertical as it saves space but if
    the horizontal is better accuracy and easier setup then maybe that’s the
    route.

Right now, it seems that the best ‘frame’ is anchors to the building (in the
floor, to the walls, etc)

I think that a frame that you lay down will end up working better for a while. I
think that the balance of the router on the sled is causing some grief, but we
are working through other, more critical, issues right now.

David Lang

1 Like
3

Thanks David for your respsonse.

That’s what I thought, I wouldn’t be able to reuse the frame because I noticed from the images of an M4 setup it appeared the bands extended much farther from the cutting board. I am not sure why that is, like if there is a minimum distance or the longer they extend the better accuracy when cutting to the edges.

I will probably build a horizontal frame on the floor and just put it up against the wall when not in use.

Thanks

4

Deevo wrote:

That’s what I thought, I wouldn’t be able to reuse the frame because I noticed
from the images of an M4 setup it appeared the bands extended much farther
from the cutting board. I am not sure why that is, like if there is a minimum
distance or the longer they extend the better accuracy when cutting to the
edges.

The problem is the angles of the belts. The old maslow had the ring and the
belts moved from ~10 degrees from horizontal to ~10 degrees from vertial. Also,
the only angles you have to worry about are to the two top anchors

On the maslow 4, the motors/arms/vertical frame interfere with each other so
that instead of the limit being 10 degrees (70 degree swing) it’s 20 degrees (50
degree swing). This means you can’t get as close to the two adjacent anchors as
you could with the old maslow

But the bigger problem ends up being the angle between diagonally opposite
anchors. When you are in the top left corner, you have to aorry about the angle
between the top right belt and the bottom left belt. And that ends up being
limited to no less than 130 degrees. This ends up causing grief in all four
corners FAR sooner than was realized when the design was created.

If you are curious, you can play around with the frame calculator I created, it
lets you choose custom angles and see how the different angles affect the clean
cutting area https://lang.hm/maslow/maslow4_frame.html

That same tool will let you see how different frames will work for you. You
probably won’t notice if you go one or two bands beyond the green in any area,
but as you go deeper into the yellow, the effective length of the belt becomes
shorter than the software thinks it is, and that will put more stress on the
system and cause errors.

David Lang

1 Like
5

Thanks for the detail info. I am kinda understand what you are saying, however I couldn’t use the tool you created to play around with it because the link is broken. I get connection took to long to respond error, time out error. I am not sure if it is something with my connection.

6

Deevo wrote:

Thanks for the detail info. I am kinda understand what you are saying,
however I couldn’t use the tool you created to play around with it because the
link is broken. I get connection took to long to respond error, time out
error. I am not sure if it is something with my connection.

Give it another try, I had a power outage here at home today, you may have been
just lucky enough to have tried while it was down.

it is a simple html file, so you can do a save-as of the page and bring it up
locally once you can get in.

David Lang

7

Still no go unfortunately I a get certificate error:

This site can’t provide a secure connection

lang.hm uses an unsupported protocol.

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

8

Deevo wrote:

Still no go unfortunately I a get certificate error:

This site can¢t provide a secure connection

lang.hm uses an unsupported protocol.

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

yes, it’s a really old server (I do need to update it), can you do just http
instead of https?

David Lang

9

Yup http worked. That’s a great diagram, looks I will do a 12’x8’ box on my garage floor for my anchor points if it can fit. That seems to have more green area on your diagram. So your saying if you go more than 2 lines from the green error you get more inaccuracies. I am not sure exactly what you mean when you are referring to the stress when you get into the yellow, like there is too much or too little tension on the belts in those areas to keep the router in an accurate position?

10

Deevo wrote:

Yup http worked. That’s a great diagram, looks I will do a 12’x8’ box on my
garage floor for my anchor points if it can fit. That seems to have more
green area on your diagram. So your saying if you go more than 2 lines from
the green error you get more inaccuracies. I am not sure exactly what you
mean when you are referring to the stress when you get into the yellow, like
there is too much or too little tension on the belts in those areas to keep
the router in an accurate position?

The green areas are where the belts and arms are able to keep lined up. when you
get into the yellow areas, the arms hit the uprights, and so the belts aren’t in
line. As a result, instead of a straight line between the center of the bit and
the anchor, you have a triangle with one short side being the arm, the other
short side being the belt, and the long side (which is shorter than the sum of
the other two sides) being the effective length.

because the distance ends up being shorter than they should be with that much
belt out, the tension in the belts will be higher. This will cause things to
flex (belt, arms, frame, etc)

There is a little table above the diagram that shows what the effect is when you
think you have 1000mm between the anchor and the center of the bit for different
angles (the bands on the diagram are 1 degree of error per band)

angle effective length
1 999.98
2 999.921
3 999.822
4 999.684
5 999.507
6 999.29
7 999.034
8 998.738
9 998.403
10 998.029

so when you hit the first band, you are only off by 0.02mm, not enough to notice

the second band you are off by 0.08mm, still not enough to notice

but at the third band, you are not off by 0.18mm, much more error, but probably
not enough to notice

at the fourth band, you are off by 0.3mm, which is right about the desired
accuracy of the maslow

etc.

when belts are shorter, the error is more significant than when the belts are
longer. so as you go into the top left corner (where the error is in the long
belts to the top right and bottom left anchors) the error will be less than this
table shows

but as you go to the center of the left side, the errors are probably going to
be higher than this table shows

as always, your milage may vary, and how sensitive you are to errors will depend
on what you are cutting

and most important of all, an error in the frame dimensions (calibration) may
produce far more error than a few bands into the yellow

I hope this helps explain things.

David Lang

11

Thanks David for the detailed response.

I got it, I didn’t realize the arm can hit the support and interfere with the angle of belt. Makes sense why anchors positioned farther out give it a better angle.

12

One last thing David, I was wondering about.

So I ordered the concrete anchors vs doing the wood frame, but I was wondering since the anchor points are very low to the floor and the Maslow would be cutting a board probably on a 1" high spoil board, does the vertical angle of belt effect anything?

Like lets say I had to raise the Maslow a few more inches so it was 3 or 4 inches from the floor would that cause problems? Would you have to re-calibrate if the high was adjusted?

Thanks again for spending the time for your detailed responses :slight_smile:

13

Your thoughts are right and they do contribute to the calculations. There are settings you will want to manually modify in Maslow for the Z heights for each arm to corresponding anchor point.

Dano

14

Deevo wrote:

So I ordered the concrete anchors vs doing the wood frame, but I was wondering since the anchor points are very low to the floor and the Maslow would be cutting a board probably on a 1" high spoil board, does the vertical angle of belt effect anything?

Like lets say I had to raise the Maslow a few more inches so it was 3 or 4 inches from the floor would that cause problems? Would you have to re-calibrate if the high was adjusted?

there is code to account for the difference in height between the anchor and the
arm, so in theory it should not matter.

In practice, the arm bends down towards the anchor and there are some other
things that make me (and some others, but not all) think that having the belts
close to flat is a good idea.

With concrete anchors in the floor, you can make posts that raise where the
belts attach up to be level with the arms when the router is at the lowest
point. don’t try to do it with a simple bolt (the bolt will flex). Instead,
think of a screw in leg to a desk or table that has a threaded bolt in the
middle and then a wide wood disk around it to prevent any flex

a shoter version of these legs

make the puck a different height for each arm and ideally try to not have the
belt ride on the threads

just a stack of plywood disks glued together with a long both through them and a
nut on the top of the stack to pull everything tight could work (and washers or
spacers to keep the anchor from sliding up the smooth part of the bolt)

David Lang

15

I see I will look into that when I setup the anchors maybe I have some blocks around I can drill holes through.

Thanks again for the tips!