Hi, Assembled my workbee (1000 x 1500 screw x belt). Noticed its off square a little. Should have noticed earlier I suppose. Anyway, firstly, I'm assuming calibration won't work around small issues with square and I have to deal with this. If so, how do I best do it , with the least amount of disassembly. I'm hoping there is a clever way to go about this. Is it a matter of loosening the screws on the plates and the supports? Thanks Max
Yes - loosen screws holding end plates and any angle brackets, pull the framework back into square, re-tighten all the fixings. It might help to put a cramp across the diagonal that is longest to pull it square and hold it while you tighten it. If you haven't got a suitable cramp use a loop of string, hook it over the corners, put a stick between the two strands and twist to shorten it. Alex.
Spoilboard install also goes a long way to keeping things square, so check while tightening down your spoilboard too.
Thanks for the tips. I haven't gotten a spoilboard yet actually. How do you actually fix the spoilboard onto the extrusions? There isn't really anything in the ooznest manuals about this as far as I can tell. Attach it with angle bracket like this? (skip to 5:42)
One way is to use drop-in T nuts. Recess the bolt head into the top surface of the spoil board, getting the depth of the recess and bolt length right so it almost reaches the bottom of the V slot. Fit the drop-in T nut and tighten so the nut is in line with the slot. Line the spoiler board up, loosen bolts so the nut drops into slot and then tighten. Alex.
OK, managed to get the frame square. Still waiting on my spoiler board delivery, but tried some of the suggestions, and couldn’t get the misalignment out. I have a 30cm Woodpecker engineer square which I trust and it showed square issues. I pretty much loosened every relevant screw , tightened then noticed alignment went wrong , then retraced steps etc until I got to understand which parts pull the frame out it alignment. One of the major culprit are the three Y supports I found. Any asymmetry there pulls the frame out of alignment. Anyway this is the process that worked : 1. Loosened all screws on the Y support joists , including the angle brackets on the supports , any angle brackets connector binding X and Y beams and the screws on the plates that connect to X beams. I leave the plate screws on the Y beams alone 2. I pull the frame square by tugging the plates and constantly check all corners. 3. When square tighten the screws on the plates avoiding asymmetric tightening. Recheck corners. Tighten some more. 4. I put 4 plastic playing cards shims underneath each of the 3 Y support joists, where they meet the X beams, so that they level up flush with X beam. Of course making sure they align with pencil marks as stated in manual. 5. I first tighten the support joists angle brackets screws that connect to X beam, for the support joists closest to the corners. Avoid asymmetric tightening. Go around many times. Check corners. 6. I then tighten the support joists angle bracket screws that connect to the actual joists, again avoiding asymmetric tightening. 7. I then do 5 and 6 on the middle support joist Now it’s all pretty squared up. There is one corner though that is susceptible to ever-so-slight misalignment by pulling the frame by the plates. Can feel a slight click on the engineer square , fixed by pushing or pulling the plate, so there is something that is too loose there. I’m gonna get some fresh screws as some of them are a bit damaged, to see it that fixes it. To be honest I think this build could use some corner parts. Nice big perfectly square machined corners to make sure the frame stays square. At 1500mm I think the forces on the corners are just to great and it needs more support. Any parts on openbuilds I could use I wonder ?
OK, moving the spoiler board on the machine pushed it out of square again a little I did follow the suggestion about using the spoiler board as reference. I checked it with large square and it was dead on. Diagonals within 1mm, so this makes sense. Anyway, I positioned the spoiler board so its corner matched a reference corner on the machine, made sure it was flush and you could see the slight deviation building along the x-axis. Was a matter of loosing bolts again on the frame and prodding it in alignment and attaching the rest of the corners of the spoiler board to the machine. Was a bit tricky to get the manually drilled holes align with the t-slot underneath. I made the reference corner hole 'tight' and rest of holes loose , so I had some slack to align and then tighten everything. I'm hoping to use the machine to make my next spoiler board !
I had “squaring” issues too and basically put them on hold until I mounted the spoil board. The technique I used was to square the spoil board to one end of the machine (think X axis) and clamped it down using 4 clamps. I then loosened every bolt on the corners and then squared the other end to the spoil board and clamped it. After confirming square on the X/Y beams using my square and the sliding X to Y technique (I had to remove the lead screws to allow the X to move easier), I snugged one bolt at a time on each corner. Once I made 4 trips around the machine, I made 4 more trips tightening each bolt. I’d check square after I touched each bolt. It took me a little bit to get to the clamped spoil board “trick” but once I did, it only took about 15 minutes to tighten everything down. I left the clamps on until I got all of the bolts installed in the spoil board. Hope this helps someone deal with a very frustrating situation.
To follow up on this thread. After converting my workbee y axis to screw I figured out there is one screw on the y end plate that pulls it out of alignment when I fully screw it in. There is a visible tiny gap that closes when I screw it fully and pulls that corner out of square. Just leaving it a quarter turn open gives perfect square. I could go in detective mode and figure out what piece involved isn’t perfect , but I’m happy to leave it as is. I put a nice sticker on it so I remember it.
