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

[Zeeflyboy]

Hello chaps,

I'm designing myself what I consider (or at least hope!) to be my ideal man cave based machine, the plan is to buy the components and materials over the next couple of months and then start machining parts for it.

I need to do a fair amount of work in aluminium, carbon fibre, FR4, and plastics so that is what the machine is being built around. If it can look nice with some fancy anodising then that's a bonus! I currently have an X6-2200L which I have upgraded with various bits and bobs, a pokeys57cnc ethernet controller (I fancied using mach4 so needed to upgrade), leadshine closed loop easy servo nema 23's, and some glass scales for calibrating.

While it generally does a pretty good job after some tweaking, there are a few design flaws though that niggle me, the bearing arrangement for ball screws is utter crap and the screws themselves have pretty mediocre accuracy. The Y-axis is also lacking in rigidity imo and there are a few other things that could stand to be improved such as the ability to tram the spindle.

Therefore, I had a choice - either I spend some fairly decent money and time upgrading and fixing these issues, or I just go the whole hog and build a new machine that addresses all these issues while also giving me a larger work area and the fun of building a new machine for myself, then transfer my electronics across. I am choosing the latter option :)

Current machine and table... you can see me sizing up the enclosure I want to build in the second pic:







I am working under some specific constraints - it needs to fit on my CNC table as I spent too much time building it to change it now lol. I am also trying to fit it inside an enclosure so every mm counts in overall footprint - it cannot grow too much over the existing machine so the increased work area needs to come from small increases in overall size and just using the space a bit more efficiently.


This is the overall design I've come up with after a few iterations (beefed the gantry arms up from 20 to 25mm, re-designed Z-axis to use 4 carriages etc):








Y-Axis:

- Primarily constructed from 45x90mm heavy profile, 45x45 profile, 20mm precision ground solid plate for tool plate, and 20mm plate for corner pieces.
- Dual motor to make up for massively increased weight and also to play with automatic squaring.
- Motion components: HGR20 x 4, HGH20CA x 8, FK12 x 2, FF12 x 2, MBA12-C x 2, TBI 1605 Ground C5 ball screw and nut x 2
- Total span 1000mm, Travel 750mm.
- Permanent water tray to contain chips/coolant and also for cutting CF fully submerged. Constructed from 12mm black Acetyl, 5mm Acrylic side windows and finished with a levelled platform for a 10mm Aluminium tool plate. G1/4 drain point at front.









X-Axis:

- Primarily constructed from 40x160 Heavy ITM profile, 25mm precision ground solid plate for gantry arms.
- Motion components: HGR20 x 2, HGH20CA x 2, FK12 x 1, FF12 x 1, MBA12-C x 1, TBI 1605 Ground C5 Ball Screw and nut x 1
- Total Span 550mm, Travel 395mm.


It has been suggested that perhaps moving from 40x160 heavy profile to 40x200 heavy profile would yield a more rigid machine. I think I can probably do that within current constraints without losing gantry clearance... thoughts on the benefits of re-designing around the larger 200mm profile?










continued in next post due to pic limit...