Giant Map of San Diego - This had to be redone a few times as the right hand side of my machine no longer works, but cutting an inch or so off the far right avoids the issue.
A lot of my stuff is over the max cutting space for the machine so I def would have liked a pro machine for a few of these. I digress. Any questions about any of these holla back.
Really? That’s pretty strange that half of the machine would give up the ghost. I grew up in San Diego, but looks like you got the Coronado area, I was just a little further south in Chula Vista! Awesome projects, glad to see some stuff from you
The first signs, what type of wood and thickness were the slats behind the numbers? I think it came out really stellar.
The far right hand side of my machine stopped cutting with the same power as the rest of the machine. I noticed that items placed on the far right would fail to cut all the way through with more and more frequency.
Lots of troubleshooting went by and support determined my machine was broken and the only option was to pay a few hundred to ship the machine back to attempt repairs. I don’t use it to make money so spending hundreds more to try to fix it sounded gross. So I just don’t use the far right side of the machine. If it gets worse I will have to send it back.
5mm “work” boards from home depot. They are usually way in the back in a cupboard looking thing, come in large sheets for cheap. Quality can be hit or miss, and the grain of the wood is massive sometimes, but I get like 6 12X20 panels for the price of one GF proofgrade panel.
I’ve had this happen as well, it’s easy enough to just put it back on the track and line it up. My issue is different, there is something misaligned in the machine that makes the machine lose power in certain positions so the pew pew is reduced.
I had a similar issue with my right side - it turned out that the bed wasn’t level. I took my calipers and measured from the top of each corner of my crumbtray to the base of the machine casing. My right side was something like .07" off, but in laser terms, that’s a decent enough variance for it not to cut through. I even noticed during puzzle cutting, that a smaller variance was giving me a similar effect, so I had to clean my optics more often to combat that.
That was before this weekend when I shimmed both my machine and the table it sits on to get closer to near level. Been a dream since finding all that out.
There is not much that happens when the head is off on the right. the ribbon and the aim of the laser is about all I can imagine. If the ribbon is good and the gantry parallel the aim of the laser to the mirrors on the head would not have to be off much to make a bigger difference on the right farthest away from it than close. Perhaps also a very minor amount of crud there would be more problematic the further away you were from that origin.
Of those issues only the laser aim would be hard to check .
The alignment of the laser was what the expected issue was. It’s been a month or so at this point so I am just working around whatever the issue is. I figure once my tube dies I will have to pay for that, and it will include alignment.
Interesting, I will double check how level the bed is. We did check it at the time and it seemed ok, but I don’t recall checking the depths from the corners. The issue also started suddenly and has been getting worse, so it would be odd if physical leveling was the issue, but I am no engineer.
I actually think it could be a little deeper in the deep spots, but I was tired of messing with the settings. I was experimenting with two passes at 100% power which was ultra deep, but the poor quality of the wood was making i t fall apart.
