Today I Learned: Surfacing edition

[mcdanlj (Michael K Johnson)]

I have in the past put a sheet of hardboard on top of my MDF “spoilboard” (Yo Dawg, I heard you like spoilboards, so I gave you a spoilboard for your spoilboard!), and just turned it around and/or replaced it when it gets too mucked up. But today I have a thin piece and I finally decided to use that 1" surfacing bit I bought to actually surface my spoilboard, so that no small pieces of spoilboard sticking up cause me to cut my thin piece too deeply.

I started using it conversationally to get used to it, and was surprised to discover how inconsistently out of tram the whole surface was. I also discovered that I couldn’t surface boustrophedonically because it didn’t cut the same in both directions. I ended up surfacing my 1 meter by 1.5 meter OX in 20mm stripes — both in X and Y major directions — writing all the gcode by hand rather than stopping and writing a program to output the gcode. I’m not sure why, other than I got in the groove.

But now I have a surface that should be tram to the spindle movement, so I can now cut this 5mm thick plywood more precisely.

(While I was cutting that, my CW-3000 water cooler for my spindle started to leak, so now I guess I need to take it apart and figure out what’s leaking and put it back together.)

[Eclsnowman (Eric Lien)]

If you ever do end up writing a G-Code generator for surfacing spoil boards… I’ll be first on the list of your beta testers :-).

I know what you mean though about being amazed at how out of tram a spoil board can be. When I first built my new CNC and I surfaced it I was really amazed at something that seems so flat being as wavy as it was. It’s especially evident on that first skim pass you run on the top where all the high spots in low spots reveal themselves.

[donkjr (Don Kleinschnitz Jr.)]

@mcdanlj

boustrophedonically

Ok how many of you looked up this word … be honest!