How to Tram Your Shapeoko

hey guys Winston at carbide 3d here as a DIY kit there are certain degrees of freedom in the construction of the shape boku that are entirely in your hands as the end user and if you want to see and see that runs as true as possible it's up to you to dial in the accuracy of your machine tramming is the process of ensuring the spindle is perfectly perpendicular to the work surface if your spindle isn't squared to the waist board it can leave shallow grooves or scallops in the bottom of pockets let's imagine an extreme illustration say you had a dinner plate sized end mill on your router any small tilt in the router will cause one side to dig in deeper like how you would use a power carving disk on an angle grinder so correcting this is important if you want perfectly smooth pockets or flat faces if you use your CNC to plane down larger pieces of wood that being said if you only use small animals like quarter-inch or smaller or V carb signs you may never experience any complications due to tram error or it may be so slight that a couple seconds with a random orbit sander is all it takes to bring your piece to cosmetic excellence I personally went years without trimming my shape OCO and I was never disappointed by the projects I made but if you seek the best finishes possible or I've now triggered your OCD here's the easiest way I've found to trim a shape oka there are two axes of rotations we need to correct rotation about the x-axis and rotation about the y axis and before we can measure them we need a reference surface that's parallel to the XY plane so I'm going to surface my waist board first now even though it's not perfectly smooth because of the scallops and ridges caused by tram error the average slope of the waist board should still be zero now to see just how askew the router is we need something that will spin in a plane perpendicular to the z axis and for that I've refined the patented Winston Moyet ramming assistant it's a piece of wood with two quarter inch holes drilled in it and a slot cut through each you can CNC machine one or do it by hand if you're lazy once you have this piece you just clamp in two end Mills or dowels and off you go precision really doesn't matter here which is the beauty of this device because the circle that's defined by the rotation of the point at the end of this contraption will always be perpendicular to the router z-axis keeping in mind the scale surface of your waste board try and look for trends in the clearance under your tram indicator where is it consistently high and where is it love if you really want to quantify this measurement you could try and use a test indicator mounted in the collet if you can fit it in or a special tramming indicator if you can find one that's low-profile enough to fit under the gantry but it's probably overkill for a machine like this once you figure out which way your router is tilted you'll need to counteract it for tilt forward and backwards I like to rotate the x-axis rail I'll do this by loosening three screws on each side and using a non marring clamp to get some leverage then I'll rotate the rail up and down until my front to back tram error is neutralized [Music] once that's done I'll tighten the rail mounting screws up again now we need to correct the error about the y-axis of the spindle mount is parallel to the waist board my preferred way to do this is to take the z-axis carriage off the rails and slightly loosen the screws holding the spindle mount leave one of them fairly snug as a pivot then slide it back on the z-axis rails now you could try and measure and adjust the levelness of your mount visually through repeated trial and error but I prefer a physical reference using a pair of 1 2 3 blocks which every hobby machinist should have I'll just lower the mount to the face of the blocks and force them flush you may have to do this once or twice because as you tighten the screws again you may accidentally tweak the orientation of the mount the results may not be 100% perfect since you're relying on the average slope of the waist board to be 0 but in my opinion this method of trimming the spindle mount in the XZ plane provides the best return on investment with regards to time and effort and really for most people this should be plenty good enough if you're chasing single-digit or sub now precision on a desktop cnc kit not only are you crazy but you probably already have an idea of how you would further tune your shape OCO hope this walkthrough helps those of you who are looking to dial in your machine just a little bit more to improve your surface finishes with flat end mills good luck and have fun machining folks [Music]

Channel: Carbide 3D

Views: 42,384

Keywords: Carbide3D, CNC, Shapeoko, Nomad, 883, Carbide Create, Carbide Motion, Technology, Machining, Tramming

Id: rGOGlNurglE

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019