Gantry Aluminium thickness guidance

[njhussey]

Well, the Nema 23 will probably stall if all of the end stops fail. Chances of that happening......

Greater than you think....well if your home switch becomes loose from vibrations (fast trochoidal milling) so your gantry slams on a rapid home into the side beams.....luckily the AM882's have stall detect!!

What happens if I'm using a tube design with thin walls and the plate rams the thin skinned tube?

Guess it'll bend it!

Here is the basic design.

The Y extrusion is quite big, 80x160, and the others are all 80/80 profile.

This is the rough plan

This is where I'm up to



To be used for 3d Printing, Composite 3d milling, wood, and possibly aluminum

Somewhere on the forum there is a bending moment calculator which will sort this for you, however I'd say minimum of 15mm for the plates, and for the difference in cost go 20mm, and I'd strongly consider putting a plate across your two 80*80 Z axis extrusions to stiffen up the gantry.

for the Z axis I'd put thicker plates on as those don't look that thick and I'd put the rails on the front plate not back to stiffen it up. I'd also consider connecting your motors to the ballscrews via belts and pulleys rather than directly, this helps take out any resonance (from cutting) and stops it being fed back to the stepper motors.

If you're using the ballnut housing that's in picture 2 how are you going to connect it to your Y axis plates, you'll not get to the screws behind it to tighten it?