so ive been building my first cnc plasma over the last few weeks. its just a 4x4 with a water table. i finally got the last of my parts machined and assembled them to the frame today. before I started working on the electronic end of things I figured I should do a little q.c. work. which I had done during the assembly process but with a lot of it being welded, I wanted to go over everything. checking how square it was and how parallel the table ran to the gantry all that good stuff. which it turned out fairly well for being welded. which comes to my question. how flat does the table HAVE to be? I'm struggling with this as I prefer to have it perfect. I too realize that perfect is very hard to achieve when welding everything like I have. I'm off by .04 over 4ft. I have the torch set up as a probe with a limit switch that'll detect the work for now. that was all I was going to do until I got around to getting a THC. I wasn't planning on doing that until I see how much use the machine really gets. its going to be a plasma table mainly and have a removable bed that will attach and cover the water table for doubling as a router. I will attach a photo here to just give an idea of what I have going on here. I can make a few cuts here and there to get that .04 down to .015 or better. that will require quite a bit of time tho. so if .04 isn't going to drastically affect cut quality or any other variable, then I may just go with it. I'm not going to be cutting extremely precise parts as youll see from the construction. I also plan to switch to linear rails, again after I see if it gets enough use to justify the investment. now the router table will be more flat than that, as ill be able to add shims if needed and ill have more adjustment there as it wont be permanently fixed to the frame. I'm not experienced in cnc plasma cutting at all so any and all help is greatly appreciated.