Is this a faulty 3018 ProVr?

Just unpacked this 3018 PROvr from umart and the Base plate is completely off centre. The base does not line up with the underneath mounts which are fixed. From what i can tell, its ament to arrived aligned (manual + brief internet search). Seems the whole base is offset to the left? One of the screw mounts below is crooked and the other firmly attched to the base? Just seems odd. Probably faulty assembly? Im a newbie to the scene so any help is appreciated.

 

It may be a sign of an underlying issue but those are slot nuts which can be pushed up and down their slots quite easily, so you can simply push it into place (same for all the others after loosening the screws)

IOW I don't think it's necessarily a problem if you can push them across by hand with a screwdriver or something (don't poke the threaded hole though)

ED- unless this part was supposed to be preassembled, in which case it doesn't look like it was done right at all.

ED2- It looks like there's some kind of glue in the slot. If that is the case, I'd turn it over and see if it lines up (looks like it's supposed to be symmetrical so probably not) and if it doesn't then probably worth starting a warranty claim, even though you could probably muck around with it to free the nuts and get it to work.

 

It was advertised as preassembled. I thought they could slide across but they seem to be glued down too. But you are right, i loosened the others and they moved freely. Ive done my best to centralise the plate but might be a little out. Does the plate have to be mm perfect? If it does i might just RMA.

 

I wonder whether there's only one glued in for the position but the rest just follow where they land.

I don't think the plate itself needs to be perfectly centre, but the slider mechanism needs to work nicely.

The closer to perfect the better, however there will be some compliance in the plastic bits anyway. Tighten the centre one down, then loosen the outer sliders just a touch and run the platen up and down the full extent, finishing back in the centre, then tighten the screws just a touch and run it again from about 5 to 95% of the movement, again finishing in the centre. Then tighten everything and check that for the most part the effort to move the platen is even - it should be quite good up to 10% of the end of travel at least. I have no idea of what the hardware quality is like, but if the rod straightness or parallelism isn't quite right there could be some binding effects if both rods are fixed rigidly. If one of the rods is on a floating mechanism it should compensate by itself unless it runs out of float.

There could be ways to adjust the parallelism and squareness of the slider rod system but unfortunately I'm not familiar with this specific machine so can only comment in general.

 

mtma Thanks for the help. It is all setup now, and as square as i can get it. The slider mechanism was pre-assembled so im hoping that it will be good. I don't need perfection just learning / mucking around with some cast acrylic until i can get into my rental with a bigger workspace!