How To Tram Your CNC Router without expensive tools Shapeoko

everybody it's Chris from full steam designs today we're playing goat simulator I know I promised a traveling video a little over a week ago but I got a little distracted trimming is an adjustment that we make that ensures that our bit is parallel to our waist board and it's done after we surface the waist board there's just a couple adjustments that we need to make they're really easy to do I'm going to teach you how to do those but first we're going to head out to the garage and I'm gonna teach you how to make a tool that we can measure it with there's a few different tools out there that you can buy to do this but today we're just gonna make our own and I'm just using some scrap pine this is some stuff left over from the flags that I make it's about 11 inches long it's 3/4 inch thick and I'm just marking a center line on it right now and I'm laying out a couple marks at one and two inches and I'm gonna go ahead and drill out the hole at one inch and then we're gonna head over the bandsaw and we're gonna cut all the way through that hole and then to that second line which was at two inches this doesn't have to be perfect but you just do need to kind of get somewhere through that hole with your bandsaw Cup just gonna clean it up with a little bit of sandpaper this isn't super important or just for looks and feel and now again we're going over to the side and we're gonna lay out the center line and I'm just coming about a half inch in and I'm gonna just drill a hole and this is gonna be for a screw to make this thing clamped together so I've got a couple old bits here these are just some kind of burnt up quarter-inch router bits I think one was actually the first carbide bit that I ever got with the shop OCO so I'm just inserting those it doesn't really matter how far I'm just making sure it's in far enough to grab and then tightening up the screws we can give these things a little tug and make sure they won't come out and we're all done making the tool so now we can go over to our router and put it in you're probably gonna have to run your router all the way up to the top to get it in there and then you're just gonna have to jog it down slowly and we're going to move around and check and you can see here on the left side of the machine it's touching and on the right side it's pretty high that's probably about 3/16 of an inch or so maybe a quarter so now I've laid out marks at 12 o'clock 3 o'clock 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock just to helped us make a little more sense and what we're gonna do is first start by adjusting from 6 to 12 o'clock so I've got it to where it's rubbing on one side and now we're just gonna go ahead and loosen up these three screws that I've marked in red on each end of our gantry the yellow one you're gonna leave tight and that's just to give us a pivot point so just make sure that you're leaving that bottom front one on each side tight now we're just gonna take a clamp and be careful when you do this because remember you've got some cables back there and we're either going to push up or pull down depending on which way we need to adjust so I was low in the front and high in the back so I'm rotating this back around the x-axis and once we're happy with that we'll just go ahead and tighten those screws down next we need to make an adjustment about the y-axis we're gonna do that by adjusting the bracket that actually holds our router in and there's a couple little holes in this plate that you can actually access the two screws that hold this mount on but it's very difficult you're not going to be able to reach it with the allen keys that come from the factory and I think it's just better to do this way so we're gonna go ahead and remove the router from the bracket and then we can just jog it down and check this here this will verify that we did a an issue of it not being straight and I'm just using a precision square block if you have some one two three box you can use those if not I recommend getting some you just need something that is perfectly square to double check this with so we'll go ahead and remove that bracket and loosen up just one of the screws that holds that in and now all we need to do is push down on the one side that was high against our block and that's gonna square that up so we can go ahead and remove the Z plate again and tighten that screw up just the one that we loosened and then you've got to get it back on you've got to get your belt around the pulleys and make sure you set you tension your belt properly this can be a little bit of a pain to get back on but just take your time and don't forget to tighten this set screw down at the bottom now we can go ahead and put our router back in make sure we clamp that down good we'll raise our access up and put the tool back in and now we're just gonna go back around from the three six nine and twelve o'clock positions and what I'm doing here is just jogging it down until it hits in a certain position then I'll jog it up about 50 microns or point zero five millimeters and move to another position and I should be able to jog it down the same amount and it should be rubbing and as long as that happens that means that we're good to go and we can go ahead and resurface are wasteful I'm using an inch and a quarter bit here to surface this and I've set my step over to 0.9 inches and that would really show us if we had any problems here but this is a very smooth finish and I'm really happy with how this came out if you learned something today or you just enjoyed the video I really appreciate a thumbs up please don't forget to hit that subscribe button and the notification bell so you can see more of my stuff also don't forget to check out my website over there you'll find links tomorrow my videos and you'll also find some great free SVG's and grayscale pngs to make like the me flags I had stuff over there all the time so make sure you bookmark it and check back often and I just really want to say thank you to everyone who's been supporting me lately you guys really helped turn this channel into something I think this can really be a great training resource for people and I really couldn't do it without you guys check out this next video to learn more about CNC routers and woodworking I'll see you over there

Channel: Chris Powell

Views: 47,948

Keywords: tram, tramming, cnc router, shapeoko, carbide create, chris powell, full steam designs, tutorial, how to, diy, x carve, inventables, carbide 3d

Id: 9h5srzEBla4

Length: 7min 3sec (423 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020