Wall mount, pi, z axis upgrades and directional cutting

I took some time off from working with it. It was mostly working at the Marietta Maker station in Georgia and I moved it back to my basement after they got a legit expensive CNC.

  1. I mounted it to the wall on hinges to save space and fold flat when I want. That was pretty straightforward.

  2. I doubled the 2x4 header… 1 2x4 had some flex to it, now it has no flex.

  3. my router was brand new and the z axis stuff lasted a bit but it ended up with too much play in that clip that hold onto the notch in the router and it bound. So I found the meticulous z axis stuff which worked great except
    3.1 the belt tension can be tough to get right
    3.2 the sled file I found didnt had a guide for where to put the ring kit so I had it too low at 1st.
    3.3 the sled balance is off and may still take some tweaking
    3.4 I got slightly different parts I found on amazon prime and they were different enough to not line up the same.
    but the zaxis seems solid and fast now

  4. I tried following every guide for raspberry pi cnotrol with the official touchscreen… I got to the point where it displays ground control, kivypi will work with the touchscreen in a test but touchscreen in groundcontrol doesnt work? I dont know, gave up on that for now, kind of dissapointing.

  5. I did some calibration tests in pic below

I found that when cutting right to left it goes straight. When going the opposite direction climbs up a bit. More weight may make a difference here, i added 2.5 pounds I have yet to test, but if I could just get all cuts to go right to left and suffer the inceased time that might work well too… havent found anything that will generate this gcode though, might need to edit something open source to test it out.

I know this covers a lot of topics Id be happy to break out any into separate threads if interested. I just did a bunch of things, some more successful than others and thought I’d share. I want to fix some of the calibration issues before cutting anything nice

4 Likes

as a quick follow up. I had to raise the ring kit position to make the sled sit flatter, and reposition the ring kit to be more centered on the router bit. Ater that it got much better. moving on to smaller details.