Update 42 - "Yellow snow part 2, and today almost sucked as bad as two days ago".
So I got up and made some coffee. Made sure I had permission to make noise for two hours, then started applying tape to the spoil board. Only it was moving. After some head scratching I soon realised that the bolts they had given me were too long. The ones I got with the small spoil board were not long enough. FFS, here we go
I dug out the washers I bought a while back and put two in each hole. Made sure that the bolts were not proud of the spoil board, they weren't. OK cool can we please carry on now?
Stuck the acrylic down and started running the job. Only once it got half way up the piece the thing was just cutting air. Cancelled it, and then realised that the bed was out of true. What I mean by this is not that the bed was not level. The whole machine is not level. What is critical, however, is that the cutting bit and spindle motor are as level with the cutting bed as is humanly possible. And mine? was badly out of whack. We are talking around 7mm disparity between the front of the bed and rear. Hence why when it got about half way down a 1.5mm cut was not even touching the material.
I thought about a whole ton of ways to fix this without having to take the entire machine apart again. However, I could not think of one. Nearly two hours in I finally realised I should shove some plastic shims between the spoil board and the metal machine bed. There must be someone up there in the sky, 'cause this fixed the problem completely.
Only issue now was that I was nearly 3 hours into the day with F all done. So I started the job, went out onto the landing for a pee and got "Is it nearly done?" from my annoyed mother. "No mother, it is not done it has just started".
I really thought today was just destined for the **** heap, but miraculously.
I had gotten exactly what I asked for. The only ball pain in between that? was having to completely redesign the writing because the 1mm bit I had in there snapped during calibration with the new bed and I was then worrying that I could easily snap another one and totally ruin that piece of acrylic. So, I switched it to a 1.5, but then the text was too small.
I have one more job to do today. If you cast your mind back to this.
Being the broken ice cut out at the bottom. It should have shards of broken ice in it like this.
Unfortunately two were too small to even attempt to glue to the window acrylic, and two accidentally went up the vacuum cleaner. They were also too small to glue down properly, and thus I need to design them and cut them out of that 3M white vinyl and apply them as decals.
So I got up and made some coffee. Made sure I had permission to make noise for two hours, then started applying tape to the spoil board. Only it was moving. After some head scratching I soon realised that the bolts they had given me were too long. The ones I got with the small spoil board were not long enough. FFS, here we go
I dug out the washers I bought a while back and put two in each hole. Made sure that the bolts were not proud of the spoil board, they weren't. OK cool can we please carry on now?
Stuck the acrylic down and started running the job. Only once it got half way up the piece the thing was just cutting air. Cancelled it, and then realised that the bed was out of true. What I mean by this is not that the bed was not level. The whole machine is not level. What is critical, however, is that the cutting bit and spindle motor are as level with the cutting bed as is humanly possible. And mine? was badly out of whack. We are talking around 7mm disparity between the front of the bed and rear. Hence why when it got about half way down a 1.5mm cut was not even touching the material.
I thought about a whole ton of ways to fix this without having to take the entire machine apart again. However, I could not think of one. Nearly two hours in I finally realised I should shove some plastic shims between the spoil board and the metal machine bed. There must be someone up there in the sky, 'cause this fixed the problem completely.
Only issue now was that I was nearly 3 hours into the day with F all done. So I started the job, went out onto the landing for a pee and got "Is it nearly done?" from my annoyed mother. "No mother, it is not done it has just started".
I really thought today was just destined for the **** heap, but miraculously.
I had gotten exactly what I asked for. The only ball pain in between that? was having to completely redesign the writing because the 1mm bit I had in there snapped during calibration with the new bed and I was then worrying that I could easily snap another one and totally ruin that piece of acrylic. So, I switched it to a 1.5, but then the text was too small.
I have one more job to do today. If you cast your mind back to this.
Being the broken ice cut out at the bottom. It should have shards of broken ice in it like this.
Unfortunately two were too small to even attempt to glue to the window acrylic, and two accidentally went up the vacuum cleaner. They were also too small to glue down properly, and thus I need to design them and cut them out of that 3M white vinyl and apply them as decals.
