Spoilboard with QCW

1

My Journeyman is on a QCW (bottom mount) and has not yet been used. Preparing to flatten the spoilboard, I watched 1F’s video.

  1. My flattening bit can reach just beyond the board edges in the X-axis and the front edge (Y-axis). But it won’t reach the edge on the rear. The video showed flattening a separate board sitting on the MDF for the QCW. Is that second board what people actually call their spoilboard (I thought it was just an example for the video). If it is, they lose a bunch of Z-axis, but they can size it so that it’s entirely flattened.
  2. If the spoilboard is what I thought it was (MDF slats separated by T-track), then how do most users flatten the rear edge? Do they just make it shorter than the directions from 1F, or just tolerate a ‘lip’ at the back of the bed. The latter would make tiling a problem, but I have no immediate plans to use tiling.
2

I struggled with the same question for a while. I got my Journeyman 6 months ago and have not used it a ton but have done several projects. It took me so long to attach the MDF slats with screws that I decided to place a separate piece of MDF on top of the slats.

The separate piece I used is the exact size of the cutting area, so on the back of the machine there is a drop off between the separate MDF piece and the original slats on the frame. It’s worked fine for me, except the most difficult part of the CNC for me is flattening the wasteboard. I kept receiving the soft limit errors and despite all of the posts about it, still couldn’t figure it out so ended up manually flattening it