Quote Originally Posted by Bravin Neff View Post
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I am surprised to read this. Granted, my machine is a little on the small side compared to many I see here, but it will fit on an 80" x 40" machine. The going shop rate is $60/hour near me, so I am counting on all the machining work coming in just a few hundred $. Given how much money people invest into designing and building their own CNC routers, I would thinking have the rail surfaces and mounting pads machined would be easy to justify.
It's an interesting point, and I wonder if there is a difference between UK and US here. I have no idea where I would go to find a jobbing engineering shop anywhere near me, let alone one with that kind of capacity. My own machine top rails are roughly 1.8m long, 1m separation, on a floor-mounted machine. It would be great to have had that machined but like most (UK) folks on this forum, I ended up with an epoxy bed instead. My background is IT so I have very few contacts in the engineering world - I wonder if anyone else knows how likely/easy it would be to find machining capacity like that, available at an acceptable cost, in the UK?