In my previous video, I finished building this Pantorouter XL.
And in this video, I'll focus on accuracy and improvements.
The machine works fine, as it is, for joints like this one.
But, when I cut this particular joint, I ran into a bit of a
problem, and I had to give it slack to make it fit.
If you look closely here, you can see that this tenon
is more this way and this one more this way.
And so it appears that these tenons are a little bit closer
together than the mortises. Even on the template
they're both spaced the same. So, somewhere on this
Pantograph mechanism, I have a very slight geometry error.
Before taking it apart, I'm just gonna check
some alignment here.
So, I put in a 1/4 inch shaft in the router.
And that appears to be level with the table.
Let's check for squarings.
And, it looks like there's a much bigger gap here than here.
So, something in the table is not quite perpendicular
to how the router moves. Checking that with a plunge.
You can see the shaft move side to side, a little bit
as I plunge. So, the router's axis is off.
It is also not entirely parallel
to the main pivot, down here.
So, I think it's best if I take it all apart and
check each component individually.
It's important that the shafts are parallel and
the links have no twist to them.
So, by placing 2 parallel rails on a flat surface
we can check for twist. And, let's see.
Now, it does rock, back and forth, a little bit.
I have about 10 thou worth of rocking. That's a
1/4 millimeter, which I'm not sure if that's serious enough
to fix it. And checking distance.
36 centimeters on the dot, here.
Checking this leg. It has some rocking as well.
In fact, more that the other link. And given that it's a
shorter link, this is actually more severe.
And, checking the distance I've got 18 centimeters and
half a millimeter. So that's a bit far out.
Ooo. This is about a millimeter and a half
too wide here, so that could be a serious problem.
And this operating lever has also got quite a bit of
twist to it.
Easily 13 thous, so... That's the most severe one.
But, I want to rebuild this one anyways to make it
a bit sturdier.
I just whittled some 3/16 section octagonal stock.
And that'll be good for plugging some of those holes
so I can re-drill them.
So, I've plugged up and flush cut the holes
and marked where they're supposed to go.
And now the challenge is to make sure that the drill is gonna go
exactly in here and not wander.
So, I'll punch a divit in the middle.
And now I'm gonna put this drilling guide on top of it
but how to center it. So, I'm gonna put the drill into it that
the drilling guide uses. And now I
can use the point of that drill
to line up my drill guide
exactly with the hole.
And I'll just clamp that in place.
That looked like it worked so I won't have to make a new part.
This hole here is now plugged. And now I need to mark that
in such a way that I have a little twist in here.
So, I've got a 3/16th inch drill and I'm just gonna use the
point of it to mark where that needs to be so
that it's level with the other holes.
This hole is only about 13 thou or about 1/3rd of a millimeter
off from where it was supposed to be so it's probably a bit
nitpicky trying to fix it.
Well, it still rocks but only by about 3 thou so
I'll call that close enough.
This is the operating lever and aside from having a bit of
twist with the shafts in here
I got the hole here, a little bit crooked.
And when I was using it I could tell there was a little bit
of twisting flex in this lever so I updated the design
and I added this extension to the plywood here
which would be right here.
And here's the dimensions for it.
So, we're gonna make this one.
The style or construction for this link is just like the links
I made in a previous video so I'm not going into full details
on how to make them this time.
It's a lot of tweaking and re-work but hopefully yours
will be more accurate to begin with.
Especially if you're not trying to make video at the same time.
To make sure these holes line up correctly with this
shaft in place, I put the screws in the holes with
this thing clamped on here and I just
whacked both of them.
And that marks exactly where the holes need to be drilled.
I figured out why the main Pantograph axis down here
was not perpendicular to the table. It's because
this whole thing has got a bit of play in it, like so.
When I loosened the nuts and when I
tightened them down for the track here
I had it a little bit crooked so I just have to make sure
that as this goes in and out this stays constant
And then tighten the nuts again.
And if I move the plunge sled in and out now
it doesn't move. So that's very parallel.
Probably more so than it needs to be.
I've just taken the machine completely apart again for
varnishing. And one of the things that I still need to do
is to attach some dust guards here.
Like these ones here. Basically putting 2 pieces of
of wood alongside the track. And that helps dust from
getting into here.
After that, I varnished everything and I had a
time lapse camera going at the same time,
And it's kind of fun to watch though varnishing is really
not that interesting.
When I initially put this together I had these guys
screwed down and these ones loose so that the top would
adapt to the bottom rails. But now that I've got these
dust guards in place, I can no longer hook these spaces on
here to make sure these are parallel. So what I've done
instead is to insure these ones are parallel and locked down,
And these ones are loose so these ones will adapt.
And I'm adding just a wee bit of oil to the track.
I figure the lighter oil will
make the glides run easier.
I got to make a dust guard for here and I just got to mark
where I need to cut out.
And I made another one of these rails to go on the front.
I made another time lapse of assembling it all, which is a
more interesting than varnishing.
What was particularly
satisfying, is when I put the Pantograph together
the last hole of the last shaft I inserted aligned within
a millimeter or so. I think I had that
Pantograph 00:09:14.05] just about right now.
I think that solved my distortion issue.