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

[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.