Joe's 1000x600x200 steel and aluminium router started

[devmonkey]

I have M8 tee nuts in the underside of my plywood baseboard with a drilled MDF spoilboard on top but I doubt you will allow anything so porous or flexible onto your machine. My spacing is 100mm and it's definitely too large.

One thing to consider is making the effort to get the holes on exact multiples of 50 or 75mm from your zero reference in both X and Y. You probably will drill them here anyway but this makes it easier to plan the layout of a job if you want to drill fixing holes in the workpiece, dedicated spoilboard or a jig. I say this because I made the mistake of drilling the holes, fitting the tee-nuts and then turning the board over to screw it down which means the grid is not as perfectly aligned as I would wish. We live and learn, it'll get fixed one day.

I was going to drill the fixture holes before finally fitting the bed, but I agree it is better to do it afterwards once the machine is properly aligned. I haven't squared the gantry yet, nor properly defined zero. Will get the bed fixed to the frame in its final location, clamp on a sheet of MDF on top to square the gantry, define zero then finally drill the fixture holes.

I'm also toying with the idea of redefining my long axis as Y and the gantry axis as X so it lines up with the natural way of looking at it from the front and the axis orientations match the DDCS buttons, otherwise I'm going to make a mistake. I would define zero as front left.

I have drilled and tapped the bed and frame, and bolted to the locations where I had fixed and milled the aluminium strip. Reads within +/- 0.01mm everywhere in this region and there is a 0.02mm droop towards the as yet unsupported rear end. I think rather than try and shim the unsupported bits with shim material I'm just going to squirt some structural 2 component polyester resin in there, it is close enough and I will just make it worse trying to shim normally.