Bearing in mind I'm neither an engineer or machinist but do have a bit of an epoxy fetish ;) I've been going through some designs of gantry and I'm a bit unsure about the feasibility of constructing something.

This is my inspiration and I'm aiming to end up with something similar.

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This is the basic gantry concept without any of the supporting struts in place:

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It is 60x40x4mm steel box, 1.4m long.

For the struts I can either use solid steel rods or steel angle, the problem I have is that using steel rod will mean welding the struts in place but if I use steel angle I will have to cut and bend the ends of it very precisely to get sufficent surface area for the epoxy joint to hold properly.

Question 1 - is the basic concept a good design of gantry?

Question 2 - is welding the steel rods in place really going to distort the steel, (they will only be small welds, not much more heat than a tack)

Question 3 - Do I have a snowball's chance in hell of bashing bits of angle iron into the right shape using only a few bits of wood and a big hammer?

Any thoughts?