El Beast - Initial design phase, comments and critique welcomed!

[Zeeflyboy]

Tufnol is a brand name, Kite is their equivalent product. Tends to be a bit more pricey than the generic SRBP... I've been buying attwater brand from ebay.

As for why it's better than alu, it's probably not really! It does skim very quickly and easily with minimal mess (I skim 0.3mm at 6000mm/s using a single flute 10mm cutter)... I like to cut past the work piece in general so I set a cut through of around 0.2mm which then gets completely cleared out at the next 0.3mm skim.

The main advantage to my mind is that it's softer than alu so more forgiving of plunging down into it quickly so for drilling/tapping it's quicker. Also if cutting CF/FR4/G10/whatever then the fishtail burrs I use for that wouldn't like cutting into alu below the piece but they don't care about cutting into SRBP.

Alu can also leave a bit of an upward edge/burr where it's been cut which might mess with your perfect level bed until the next skim. SRBP doesn't leave any burr that I can see.

Both would be perfectly valid, I just tend to use SRBP for the above mentioned reasons. It is also cheaper than tooling plate... eg a board of 600x400x15mm is £50.46 vs £99.36 for the same size of tooling plate from Alu warehouse (both including VAT). That's half the price... adds up when you consider it's a sacrificial board that your machine will consume over time.

I used a 12mm board which is a bit cheaper than the 15mm... I think it will be too full of holes before I skim it down to a height that's unusable, so there's probably a balance to be found between over-paying for a thicker board that won't be used to it's potential before becoming too full of holes. Will depend on how big your bed is and how hole intensive your work is!

It is also worth considering that you don't necessarily need a piece to cover your whole bed, only big enough for the largest piece of work you need to hold down.