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

[Zeeflyboy]

Overkill?

[Zeeflyboy]

Been re-working the gantry a touch...

Its now a 40x200mm ITM profile vs the 160mm before... in addition to that, I reasoned that given that I was having to put 20mm spacers on the carriages to bring them in line with the ballscrew block, I may as well put that material into the gantry strength instead and raise the rails themselves out by 20mm... to that end I've designed a 20mm thick plate that will be mounted to the profile, then the rails will attach to the plate... the centre will be machined out to accommodate the motor mount and ballscrew bearing block.

The back is 12mm plate, and the top and bottom covers I figure may as well be made structural, so they are now mostly comprised of 4mm plate and will be screwed into the profile top/bottom, which I figure should help a little to reduce any deflection from forces in the Y-Axis.

Should be fairly strong?

[Zeeflyboy]

Oh and just out of interest guys, is there anyone in the south east here (I'm horsham based, south west of gatwick) that has a machine big enough to just accurately size up and drill a 1040x520x15mm piece of plate for some beer money?

I generally order from aluminium warehouse but they always come with -0/+2mm on dimensions and it would be nice to get it sized up more accurately and the holes drilled on a CNC to save me trying to mess around with jigs and figuring out how to get the width and length accurate. It would just be a case of whizzing up to 1mm off the edges and drilling some mounting holes, no skimming required or anything.

[Zeeflyboy]

quick and dirty assembly with the revised designs... no finer details worked out yet like seals etc

Changes:

- I've just brought the end plates within the work envelope of my current machine so that I can do them as a single piece, narrowed the bed slightly to allow the 15mm gantry mount plates to extend up to just beneath the bed surface.

- Bed taken down to 15mm to allow same clearance with slightly shorter gantry

- Gantry profile extended from 40x160 to 40x200, plus the extra 20mm of plate for spacing out the rails, back plate bumped up to 12mm.

- Moving rail Z-axis design.

[A_Camera]

quick and dirty assembly with the revised designs... no finer details worked out yet like seals etc

Changes:

- I've just brought the end plates within the work envelope of my current machine so that I can do them as a single piece, narrowed the bed slightly to allow the 15mm gantry mount plates to extend up to just beneath the bed surface.

- Bed taken down to 15mm to allow same clearance with slightly shorter gantry

- Gantry profile extended from 40x160 to 40x200, plus the extra 20mm of plate for spacing out the rails, back plate bumped up to 12mm.

- Moving rail Z-axis design.

That's exactly what I meant on CNCZone about those end plates. Did you do the same change for the bottom end plate? The one moving the gantry? I think even that should be made of one piece, not two.