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Is there an obvious way to do this? What I want is to have some reference point from the Front that I can align to or set offsets to on the rear. Maybe if I could set my object offsets relative to a selected point, instead of to an edge or to another object. Hmmm...I'll keep on thinking on this.
As someone said prior and I don't remember who, drill holes. Then you have a reference from the other side. They can be deleted prior to a carve.
Even with drilling holes, the pattern can be off square making the patterns cross.
For accurate 2 sided carves you need to make sure your machine does not have any Y offsets. Look up the calibrate Y offset procedure to determine if you need to do the re calibration.
There is also a "flip in jig" procedure that CarveWright did for better alignment for doing 2 sided carves.
I have had the best results by marking the center of the project board front and back, then using Jog to Center - you are prompted to insert the carving bit and then use the arrow keys to position the bit over the center of the board. I use an adjustable square to make crosshair marks, positioning the square from the same edge of the board for both front and back - if I'm off a fraction it doesn't matter because both front and back will align. Another technique when machining several parts on one board is to have the machine drill a hole in the center of the board. Then, when flipped over, you can actually manually plunge the bit down into the hole. If you manually move the bit in the y direction, the machine is tracking and centers exactly.
One thing to watch for is your board or sled moving away from the rail at the keypad side. This can happen if the sliding rail is not tight against the board or sled.
Sorry, I was not precise. I'm asking about project design in Designer. I haven't had many problems with alignment on the machine itself, but with being able to design a nontrivial two-sided carve and getting the front and back elements to line up, unless I want to center both front and back. Designer will allow me to set an offset of some point of an element (box, circle) or pattern from either an edge or a center line. What I'd really like is to be able to choose what part of the element/pattern to set an offset to/from, and to select any point on the board away from to set the offset. So far, I've been doing a lot of arithmetic to get front and back aligned, it seems like there should be a way to have the computer do the arithmetic for me.
Sounds like you are using the methods available to do this. It would help if you posted your project.
You could select an element of one side and make it a cut out just for alignment of the other side. Then delete the cut out.... I love the Drill hole for placement.