Stick with Ali profile or venture into plate?

[ecat]

A good time to ask questions is when things appear to be heading towards the overly complex. So, as I know nothing about engineering, here I go..

I'm toying with a design that's a cross between Steve Hilton's beauty (http://www.mycncuk.com/forums/showth...u-lot-for-this....!) and the Heiz 1000. Work area about 1000 (+/-250 will do) by 600 with a Heiz style open base. Usual unrealistic scope of requirements, at one end PCBs would be nice the the other end ali plate of course.

As my current tool set is limited - b&q bench drill (I call it Rumble the 2nd, love it to bits), circular saw, Trend router - I decided to try the design using ali profile and avoid the need machine thick plate. Profile is great, for bolting to profile, but none of the basic cnc parts are designed on a 40x40 matrix :lol:. The further I go into the design the more little spacer/alignment plates, whatever you call them, I need.

The breaking point came when I tried to figure out how to join the X and Y and Y motor: bolt the Y to a plate oversized to match the spacing of the X and make a sticky-out bit for the motor housing and another to support the base of the Y span. Combine this with spacers for the X gubbins and the fact the Z box thing needs to be plate to keep the overhang down and, well, that makes quite a lot of plate already, is it really worth continuing with the profile?

For your amusement:



The profiles shown are stitched together from Bosh models but are supposed to represent items from the Valuframe range so while the outer features are correct the inner features are mince.

Back to pen and paper in a week when my Alibre demo runs out. I cut my 3d teeth with a SFX package called LightWave so I find Alibre quite nice, unfortunately the personal edition has a very limited set of import filters.. I'm debating :confused:

One easy question, just how long is a long 5mm allen key? Silly, but no where I go has the info.