Hey all, I've been a happy shapeoko 3 user for many years (upgraded over time to aluminum bed, servos, Router 11, custom controller, the list goes on) , but I've outgrown the size of the standard S03. I recently had a really positive interaction with openbuilds customer support when my Router11 showed up malfunctioning and decided my next machine was gonna be openbuilds. I just received my lead 1010 with High Z mod and plan on building it this weekend. Any advice or gotchas you wanna share? I'm mostly interested in how in the world I'm going to square this thing in particular with the High Z mod and I'm eyeing ordering a big old slab of MIC6 plate for a build surface.
I have the mechanicals done so in the event anyone else has a similar question in the future, here are my thoughts. 1. Watch both the 1010 assembly and high z mod videos several times before you attempt this. It will become obvious what steps you need to skip and which ones you need to replace with the high Z mod steps. 2. leave everything loose and come back and tighten things down later. 3. Order a few extra 10mm M5 screws and get yourself an M5 tap. no sense in using self tapping screws if you can just tap the extrusion for the end caps. 4. you need roughly twice the size of the machine you are working on for an assembly area. 5. leave the lead screws loosely attached to the motor couplers until you are done. This makes it a lot easier to move things around while you are assembling. 6. Plan on about 4 hours to do the mechanical assembly if you are experienced. probably 8 if you aren't. 7. Count up all of your parts before you being. Yes I know it's a lot of bags and it sucks to do but I ran into a few instances where I had 12mm screws in a 10mm bag and had a few of the 65mm screws MIA. Figure that out early so you can contact support and get that stuff into the mail BEFORE you get stuck. 8. It's a LOT of parts. Work clean, don't be bent out of shape if stuff is missing (support is amazing, they'll take care of you) and don't go your own way until you have it assembled for the first time.
One more tip. for some reason after programming my blackbox for the 1010 using the blackbox programmer, my Z axis was reversed. Opening up the GRBL console and just throwing a $3=0 sorts it out. I'm not sure if that is an artifact of the High Z mod or just a misconfig in the programmer settings.
