Thoughts during tea break....
My want is for a general purpose machine - wood, alloy, plastic, engraving, carving, milling, working envelope maybe 400mm x 500mm.
Now, I see plenty of builds with 100's of kg of steel in them, but for such small cutters, is it really needed or is it "just the norm" ?
Picture if you will, no box-section, use maybe 15mm x 150mm or 20mm x 150mm aluminium to make a shoe-box structure - 4 sides and a base (base can be thinner i think).
Mount 15mm HiWin rails to the tops of the long sides, 2 carriages on each side. Mount 1610 ballscrew on outer side of longer sides.
Make gantry base to span the opening, deep enough to take two carriages suitably far apart, drop plates down from ends to fix ballscrew nuts to - it would be an inverted U shape.
Build gantry as required from base up to hold Y axis and Z axis and brace down to base of gantry at rear.
Basically just build the whole thing from a slab of alu and screw it together suitably.
Probably just hogwash, but can you
really get that much counterforce etc from such a small tool???
As i say, just thoughts, no bank balances were damaged during this process
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