I picked up a very nice lightly used, X35 machine with the Buildbotics controller at the end of 2025. I’ve been having a great deal of fun making all kinds of carvings with it.
Recently I realized that the spoilboard that came with the machine is in need of levelling, so I created a project with Fusion360 to surface the 32x36” spoilboard.
I’m having a lot of problems with the machine complaining about limits being exceeded, so I have incrementally reduced the size of the surfacing project down to 31x31 and I’m still getting complaints about exceeding X or Y limits. What’s really aggravating is that sometimes it will start the surfacing, but then complain about the limits and stop. The machine will no longer respond to the joy stick and seems to be pretty much hung up, requiring a full reboot to get it going again.
So I need to read up on what the limits are for this machine and if there are settings somewhere that might be reducing the max permissible limits. I hunted around in the software and didn’t find any place where limits are set.
Can someone point me to a place where I can learn everything about limits, so I know what I’m doing? As it is, I’m kind of shooting in the dark, not fully understanding this aspect of the machine and software.
You didn’t say, Dan, but I have a hunch that you’re trying to use Fusion’s “2D Face” toolpath to surface your spoilboard. I’ve been down that same rabbit hole. The problem is that the “2D Face” toolpath insists on starting and ending each cutting pass with the entire cutter head outboard of the workpiece you’re surfacing – you can see this in the Fusion toolpath simulation. So if you’re trying to surface a full-size spoilboard, it runs into the travel limits of the machine.
I wound up using Fusion’s “3D Flat” toolpath to surface my spoilboard. It seemed like overkill at first, but that toolpath allows me to keep the tool centerline within my spoilboard boundaries for the entire surfacing operation.
@Buckeye, Yes, I used the face tool, and yes, I was trying to figure out how to get it to quit going out so far past the edge of the material. I started out with a larger 1 1/2” cutter and changed to a 5/8” one to reduce that big deviation. But ultimately, it exposed my ignorance when it came to what the limits are and how to not to get in trouble.
Thanks to Onefinity for the links to the documentation.
I finished the videos and succeeded with flattening my spoilboard. I ended up creating a 30x30 Flat toolpath in Fusion360 and then cleaned up the remaining perimeter manually with the joystick. I didn’t know about the two top buttons to hold X or Y steady while running up and down the area. That’s a nice added tip from one of the videos.
During this process, I figured out that I was fighting two issues. One was the toolpath setup, but another was a good amount of flaky behavior in the machine. It would run for a while and then it would spontaneously re-zero and report a limit error, or one time it came up with a motor fault. The one thing about surfacing a spoilboard is that there is a continuous flow of fine dust going up the dust collector hose. Additionally, here in MA, we are in the middle of some of the coldest winter temperatures, and consequently, very very dry air. This means lots of static electricity building up in the dust collector hose. After grounding the spring steel wire in the hose to a copper water pipe, all of the flaky behavior ended.