The junior minions have assembled to watch the Ninja master trammer @themitch22 work his magic.
First thing, first. We are required to run the spindle warmup program.
Whoa there minion, what is this tramming of the machine thing? Why do we need to do this?
Easy answer, Adjusting the cutter to be perfectly perpendicular to the work surface. Otherwise the cutter cuts funny. Definitely not funny in a good way.
The first operation is, as always, set max depth and material surface.
The second operation required is to machine a couple areas beside each other on the board. These will be used as the test areas.
Chuck up the tramming indicator and take some initial readings.
Bad news folks. We are within +/- .003” over a 3” sweep. We will need to upgrade our adjustment apparatus if we desire much more accuracy.
Next step is to surface the bed. This requires us to remove just enough material so every square inch of surface has been touched by the cutter
Off by a hair
Update:
We are finished surfacing the vacuum board. We took off .045” total.
Now we move forward to the new work holding solution.
Pretty sloppy for wood folks😎
Now we wait for deep gouges and burn marks 
Thanks for doing so much work for getting the Multicam back into fighting shape! Makerspace volunteers are amazing.
That is bad news. The last time it was checked it was zero. No joking. Zero.
I was out voted on the results. I wanted zero, but it was too big a fight for the value.
We didn’t touch the spindle. The consensus opinion, with @themitch22 there, was that there was more danger in loosening the spindle than in leaving it be.
0.003” over 3” represents a bit angle of 0.0573 degrees.
Over the diameter of a 3/8” bit, that’s 0.000375” of deflection. Your plywood swells more than that when you breathe on it. I think this is literally where the term “splitting hairs” came from.
If someone has the time and energy to tram it, they’re welcome to open that can of worms. We, frankly, were too exhausted to get mired in that.
Two things we could do would be adding set screws in the spindle plate to tram on X and for Y axis use top mounts on each side that can rotate the plate. There’s ways to at least make it easier when/if we have to rebuild the spindle or the bolts slip.
Avid sells a tramming spindle mount specifically for this. I’m going to be buying one. They also publish the CAD files so we could probably ask machine shop to knock one out on the HAAS for some beer delivered off-site.
https://www.avidcnc.com/support/instructions/machineSetup/levelingSquaringAndTramming/
Looks like a good solution
Hey gang,
The minions tired of the islands and decided to return to toil. On tonights menu is creating the perimeter air dams. We are hoping this will allow us to seal the edges without tape.
We have chosen to use a 0.25” down-cut bit, milling 0.5 deep. This will be filled with water putty, there by sealing the edge. There will be a slight leak, but shouldn’t be an issue. A nice side effect will be that each vacuum zone will be clearly delineated. We also plan to add zone captions after this operation using a 0.125” bit.
If you have not already filled the kerfs with water putty, I would recommend you switch to Bondo instead. I have found that deep grooves filled with water putty will crack and break away in chunks. Bondo seems to withstand the violence of surfacing better. YMMV.
Thanks. I am already regretting the water putty option.
Oh hell. Okay. We can mill that out and use bondo. But not until we get empty caulking tubes.
