7. My Makermade CNC Adventure: Building the Final Sled

If you have your Z-Axis set up and the calibration step went well, you shouldn’t have any problems cutting the final sled. I ended up getting a prototype of the new MakerMade sled in the mail, so I used that, and it was so nice to have it all ready to go. I just had to add a few holes for the bolts that hold the router into place. The sled doesn’t come with those holes pre-drilled because not everyone uses the same router.

I had kind of improvised with my temporary sled, I’d used a tabletop round, and gone with a smaller size than recommended because I liked the idea of a more compact sled. I’d also put my weights in a different position. Once I got this sled set up, though, I realized that some of the problems I’d been having up to that point were because of my sled. Everything moved so much more smoothly once I had a perfectly balanced sled, and I think the larger size helped stabilize movement, too.

In the Maslow forum, you’ll see that people use all kinds of things for weights. You might think that anything goes, and that’s true, to a point. But make sure that whatever you used, your weights are symmetrically balanced on the sled, and they don’t dangle or move as the sled is moving. I’m a tinkerer at heart, and I like to improvise my own solutions. One thing I’ve learned over and over, though, is that often, it pays to do it the way more experienced people have done it first, then, once you understand what’s going on, you can improvise. So many I’ve looked at something and thought, “Why did they do it like that? It’d be so much better/ easier like this,” and so many times I’ve learned the hard way that there were good reasons for doing it the way the recommended way. Once you get a little experience under your belt, you can start to improvise your own solutions, but maybe try it the default way first.