Hey Gil,
user@søjf:~ bc -l
(35+3/8)*25.4
898.52500000000000000000
41.5*25.4
1054.10
Ah okay, 898.5 × 1054.1 mm.
As explained above, neither the QCW Frame nor its wasteboard slats are where the machine’s workarea is (=the area between the limits of where the milling motor can mill). You already discovered that. So you got to create a virtual 3D model that corresponds to not more than the real workarea (which is 816 × 816 mm on Woodworker, however on the front there is no wasteboard so you would “mill air” there, which does not harm) and then to position it not in the middle of the QCW frame (as explained above), but in the middle of the Woodworker’s real workarea.
The questions you should ask yourself are:
- What are the dimensions of your virtual 3D model?
- Did you probe or set manually workpiece zero so that the 3D model is inside the limits of the machine’s real workarea (the limits of where the milling motor can mill) (and not in the middle of the QCW frame, nor in the middle of the area covered with wasteboard slats, which both will not be correct).
Note that you could also make your life easier and use the front top left corner as the workpiece origin. Then you measure the area that is covered with wasteboard slats and create a virtual 3D model of this size, and then you probe the workpiece zero by using the XYZ touch plate on the front top left corner of the leftmost wasteboard slat. This way you avoid the necessity to know how much the real machine’s workarea is shifted in relation to the area covered with wasteboard slats of the QCW Frame (that also depends on whether you have Z-16 or Z-20 Z assembly, 65 mm or 80 mm milling motor, so cannot be known as one general value).
Since with this method you include the area that is not accessible on the rear, you will still get a limits error, but when you jog your router/spindle to the back and mill a thin line of shallow depth with a V-bit, you can mark a line at the end of the real workarea, and this way you can know how much of the rear region is not accessible and subtract it from the virtual 3D model’s depth dimension, until you get no limits error anymore.
You could also jog around all four sides at their extreme limits, milling a thin line with the v-bit, to see the real workarea of the machine.
You already know, as I explained above, that there is a rather large portion of the area where the t-tracks reach to the rear and that can be covered with the wasteboard slats, that never will be accessible by the milling motor. If your virtual 3D model includes this region in the rear, it’s clear that you get a limits error. You cannot surface or mill in this rear area. That’s a design issue of the QCW Frame and can only be avoided by not using the QCW frame, but building your own machine base instead.
You still have the workarea of 816 × 816 mm (32" × 32"), but when using the QCW Frame, there is a region in the front where there is not wasteboard, but only air.
Yes, you missed it:
I should have been more exact and write “the milling motor and the bit that is in the milling motor […] protrude beyond the front edge of the QCW Frame, where there is not wasteboard but only air.”
The exact value of the area that has no wasteboard depends on whether you have Z-16 or Z-20 Z assembly installed, and 65 mm or 80 mm milling motor, so cannot be known as one general value.
You still have the entire accessible workarea like the machine is sold with, but with QCW Frame the wasteboard slats do not reach to the front of the machine’s real workarea. If you manage to have some additional wasteboard there, you could use the entire workarea.