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

[Zeeflyboy]

I like your idea for protecting the motion bits. I may steal it for my own build :)

The gantry looks rather thin to me... And thus torsionally weak. I would go with a Misumi GFS8-100200, at a minimum.

Interesting. Just to be clear the part of the gantry that is actually doing the work is 65 x 200 mm made up of a heavy 40mm extrusion and a 25mm tooling plate, not just the 25mm tooling plate on it's own. The span is 620mm... it also has 6mm plate top and bottom which will be screwed down to the extrusion and the tooling plate. Given the relatively short span I don't think it should have much flex?


I could possibly re-work the design to use a 200x100 extrusion, but I think it would almost certainly require me to order new 25mm plates for the side arms as I'd need to take it further back at the top to accommodate some of the width. It is possible though as I need to order new extrusion anyway so I will have a play and see what I can come up with.