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Just received my 500 mm XCarve in the mail and could not be more excited to get this thing built up and running! I am currently living in a pretty small apartment with neighbors, so once the build is complete, I plan to make a small rolling cart so that I can safely move my XCarve out onto our patio to carve so as not to disturb the neighbors and also avoid filling my bedroom with sawdust. My question is: do any of you more experienced carvers have any advice for calibrating, testing, and just generally making sure everything is square and level before ever actually running the spindle? I.e. maybe a sharpie mount or something similar… Just looking for a basic process that I could use inside before actually beginning to carve.
I plan to look into these calibration steps: http://www.akeric.com/blog/?p=359, the youtube channel these videos are from has another few videos on the x-carve that might be worth looking at.
I’ve also created a pen holder based on this article: http://www.instructables.com/id/Coil-over-Pen-for-CNC-Plotting/ which I attached to a piece of angle aluminum which in turn is attached with m4 screws to the side of the spindle holder. I haven’t had time yet to actually try it out—10 week old baby takes precedence.
If you bought the homing switch (“limit” switch) kit, once the machine is together, get homing working and turn on soft limits to help prevent damage during your initial testing.
To help eliminate electrical noise problems plan on using shielded wire for your homing switches or plan to put some noise cancelling hardware at the gShield (low pass filter).
I’m waiting for mine to arrive, but have already ordered some millable wax and 10 inch cake pans, both for calibrating the machine and for working on wax models before burning my designs to plastic and wood. I bought the wax as a bag of loose chunks from Inventables’ supplier and the cake pans from Amazon.
