Offset Your Table

[chodges]

Don't make the same mistake we did.

Not knowing any better, we centered our table top along the Y axis by carefully measuring the distance from the end of the table to the end of the rails on both ends to make sure our table top was centered.

This works just fine until you try to cut something that is 96" long. In our case, we discovered this while running a job when we encountered our limit switches in the +Y direction about 5" before we reached the end of our 96" long material. Had we ignored the limit switches and continued in the +Y direction in order to reach the end of the 96" long material, our gantry would have have rolled completely off the rails if not for the stop blocks!

After giving this some thought, our mistake became obvious - our spindle is not centered on the gantry, it is on the 0,0 side of the gantry. And the gantry is about 5" thick.

This means that our table top should have been offset 5" towards the -Y direction.

This may be in the assembly manual, but we sure didn't notice it.

When we moved our table top to allow for the position of the spindle on the gantry, we were able to cut the entire 96" distance without any problems.

[Gary Campbell]

Good point Charlie

We temporarily mounted the spindle to the gantry and moved it from one end of the X axis extreme to the other. We then centered our table board (which was 99" long) on the X travel of the BIT.
Gary

[knight_toolworks]

my setup is not so bad but still I had the same issue I built my table from wood and I did not have a clue about cnc machines. I an access the whole top but I can just get the bit off the back of the table with lots of forward room