Hi guys, I was wondering if there’s a tram plate that can micro ajust the nod as well as the tilt. You know no shims… It wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring it up in the next meeting you have the green light and two thumbs up on this end!!
Thanks Jeff
When I was tramming the nod on my machine, I realized you’d need two of these. One between the Z carriage and the gantry to make sure the motion was vertical, and one between the Z carriage and the spindle to make sure the bit was vertical.
The spindle is already offset from the gantry enough, I wouldn’t want to add a few more inches just to avoid shims.
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I drilled and tapped the tramming plate for 4 grub set screws to adjust the nod and the included pic is for adjusting the tilt, one on each side. The tramming blocks can be pivoted out of the way if needed.
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Yes if it could be the same size or just a little bit bigger!?
Poppy welcome back!! Do you have a photo? I would be interested in seeing
We’ve actually talked about this a little. The method I have successfully done on a bunch of machines for “nod” is to loosen bolts on the gantry risers, “nod” the spindle as needed and tighten those bolts again. On the 5 or so machines I’ve done this on I’ve had more than enough adjustment to dial things in perfectly. The best part is that you don’t have to mess up the other direction to achieve this.
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Hi Jeff,
Here are the photos. The last 2 photos are where the tramming blocks were installed. I removed them because they were made from aluminum and they flexed to much, but they did worked to make fine adjustments . I plan on making them out of steel, which hopefully will solve the flexing issue.
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One of the the nice features with using the tramming blocks, is once set they can be pivoted out of the way and if you need to re-tram , just loosen the bolts on the tramming plate and swing the blocks back in place and retighten the tramming plate bolts.
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These are awesome!! I’ll have to look into this further… thank you 
@Eric When using this method, how do you control how much adjustment is made?
I’m not sure Bob I haven’t tried this yet! Maybe Eric can give a few more pointers 
@Eric I forgot to tag you in the last post so you probably didn’t see it. Can you explain how to control the nod using the process you described?
Ah so I have this:
What I did was install this and then loosen the bolts and use this as a guide to see where I was at.
While this is a really nice and easy to use tool, you don’t need it. I grabbed one because at least a few times a year I am setting up a machine so for me it makes sense.
In reality, all you really need is a stick that you can “hang” off of your spindle using a drill rod or something. I’ve made them out of bits of scrap I have around in the past.
Basically, you take some flat stock of something sturdy and drill a hole in one side and pound in a 1/4" drill bit or a drill rod from the hardware store. Do the same on the other and but facing the opposite way (so one up and one down) You can use that to measure the distance away from the spoilboard you are.
Just rotate it one way, measure and then rotate it 180 degrees and measure again. Repeat until it’s equal. It’s a little bit of a caveman approach but it works.