I still need to reinstall the spoiler board and update it, but the vertical slot is usable.
I love the idea of doing joinery on a CNC.
This is my 1st test Box Joint fingers.
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very nice - good addition
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Hey, Lewis, I really like what you’ve done here, as that’s one of the things I’d had in mind when I first decided to get into CNCing.
I take it that to make the slot in your table that you used your CNC to carve the slot into the tabletop. In my case, because I have a torsion box table upon which I mounted the spoilboard, I’ll have to mill quite deeply. What I was therefore thinking of doing was to mill through the spoilboard as deeply as I possibly can, then use a handheld router with a pattern bit to get progressively deeper until I’m through the top layer of the torsion box. The challenge will be to line up the lower one with the slot I’d milled into the top layer, as the torsion box is 133mm (5 1/4") in total thickness.
Any suggestions you or anyone else would have for me to accurately do this, would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for coaxing me towards tackling this, Lewis.
Cheers,
Marty from Kingston, ON, Canada
The following paragraph is assuming you have a LongMill.
This might depend on whether you mounted the Y rails on top of material the same thickness as the spoil board, to not lose Z travel, or not. I didn’t mount my LongMill on extra material so when I put the router mount in the lower set of holes I was able to mill through 1.5" of table top below the spoil board to cut my slot with I think was a 3.5" overall length bit.
Unfortunately I don’t have a good way to line up the bottom hole in a torsion box. I had some warping in the high humidity over the summer so I was thinking of building a torsion box. I haven’t gone ahead with the torsion box because I don’t know how I would do the vertical mount yet.
If you figure something out on that end I would be interested on how you did it.
I did us the CNC to cut into the table. I had bought an extra long endmill 3" as I recall and this is the 1st time i’ve had reason to use it. I went very conservative on the speeds and speeds. The slot can be bigger then the clamp I made. The Clamp holds the board, the slot just gives access to the clamp. When I mounted the clamp I put hand clamps on it then wiggled it around until it lined up with the slot. Clamped it down tight then drilled the mount holes. I hope this helps.
Looks nice . I made my vertical addon by cutting up an old workmate table and mounting it at the rearmost section of my work area (30x30). I made it over a year ago while waiting for my MK2 to ship . I havent used it for any projects yet as I am still in the learning stages as I guess I will always be. I was thinking I could make tight dovetails with it.
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