I put my 30x30 together using the written instructions rather than the videos and I ran into a few issues that might be reasonably easily corrected with some written instruction updates. I think it would have saved me some challenge.
- On the Y-Axis Rails page during the discussion of tightening the eccentric nuts on the Y gantry, it’s not obvious (or, it wasn’t to me at the time) that the v-wheels need to be snug on both the top and the bottom of the Y axis. Once I had the X/Y assembled, the weight of the XZ-axis gantry was enough to make the top v-wheels almost impossible to turn, but the bottom v-wheels weren’t even touching the Y axis rails. This became problematic for almost every step later - squaring things up during mounting, trying my first few cuts, etc.
- On the Drag Chains and Wiring page in the part where you mount the router - the written paragraph above the picture of the Makita router says to face the router power cable to the right but the picture and caption show the router power cable going to the left. I gather this has changed due to the update in the dust shoe design, but the two instructions are inconsistent.
- On Table Mounting… as with other folks, I, too, ended up mounting the machine in a parallelogram with one leg about 1/2" back, likely exacerbated by the v-wheel misunderstanding above, which caused all sorts of binding and challenges when trying to just run the machine forward and back on the Y axis. Having better squaring instructions up front would have saved me… well, frankly, a few hours of panic.
- On the Common Issues and Fixes, in the explanation of how to adjust the lead screw wobbling… it might be nice to know if any wobbling is acceptable. My z-axis screw arrived not 100% straight so it does have a wobble to it, but it’s not anything I’d call “excessive.” Maybe 1mm up/down? Is that OK?
For a minute I thought I was a potential victim of the problematic v-wheels saga because the wheels (even after being tightened) come really close to the center feet on the bottom, enough to leave tracks. I had to sand down a little on the feet to make the wheels clear without touching.
Finally, sort of related to the maintenance page on tightening the anti-backlash and sort of related to machine design… I can’t actually see how tight the screw in the anti-backlash nut is, and the threaded hole for the screw is really tight so there’s not really a way to “feel” if I’ve got it too tight or not. I’ve already found that half a turn or so is enough to actually stop the axis from moving at all, so I unscrewed it enough to get things moving again. It’d be really nice if you could actually see what’s going on in there.
I think I’ll take some time on the resources today to tweak the wording since some of these I’ve been thinking about recently