On Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 12:53:33 AM UTC-8, robobass wrote:
"I think you mean your spindle axis(Z)is not perpendicular to the XY plane (your table), right?"

Yes. I made sure the spindle was perpendicular to the carriage, but the entire transport assembly appears to not be fully aligned to the table base. The only way I can see to adjust it is with shims, or to face the whole table.

Here is the machine:

http://s1262.photobucket.com/user/Mo...slideshow/CNC2

If you look at the first photo, you see that the table seems to dip toward the lower left. It could also be that I just mounted the work poorly, among other things. The quick fix is to simply face the plastic block before the next run. Something I should have done first, but the block itself seemed pretty good.

"Do you have a link to the CNC machine you own?"

No. It seems to be hand built by the seller. There is "RT Technik" engraved on the front, but I found no web hits. Few of the components even have labels, but the seller says he got everything locally, and to contact him if I need any parts. Here in Germany there are maybe a dozen commercial manufacturers building machines like this, as well as many individuals making them in their garages and selling them on Ebay. I shopped for a year and this is what I chose. So far it seems like I did well. Much of the Mach3 controller software is still a mystery to me, but fortunately the seller walked me through the basics. The hardest part has been creating decent toolpaths using Bobcad26. I'm not sure that was a good decision, but I am getting the job done now, after like two months of despair.


"The hardest part has been creating decent toolpaths using Bobcad 26"

Right. That's because BobCADCAM is crapware. At best it is a cobbled together mess. BobCRAP only has one strong suit: They license the ModuleWorks surfacing toolpath engine and you can often buy BobCRAP very cheaply.

I would strongly suggest making contact with Al Depaolo for help with surfacing toolpath:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RFeoplaLMM

Al is easily the best guy they have. Tell Al I sent you. He knows how I feel about BobCRAP and he's still a member of my LinkedIn group even if he knows I frown on discussion of BobCRAP in my group because it's not an industry technology leader. One day BobCRAP's owner will finally wake up and realize that they will have to rewrite it from the ground up using a real geometry kernel like Parasolid, ACIS or CGM. Without that they will never have decent solid modeling.

If you are going to cut metals I would strongly suggest getting another machine to do it that's more rigid. Something like this perhaps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nev98v3PyXk