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

[Zeeflyboy]

So I've just got my hands on the extrusions...





Packaging looked okay but alas they weren't quite as well protected as one might hope - upon inspection one of the large extrusions has clearly suffered a drop on one corner.




Cleaned up with a file and it shouldn't have any impact on the final result.




To do a quick and easy check of comparative length I placed the extrusions on a piece of alucast plate and put them side by side. Given that a fingertip can detect features in the 10 micron range through dynamic touch (i.e. dragging your finger across a feature) this is actually a surprisingly accurate method of determining if there is any difference in length.






The good news is that they seem to be completely flush and more-over standing them side by side you can't even see a hint of daylight between the two, so they must be nice and straight as well.

Did the same for the smaller cross-extrusions where it's arguably much more important that they are of consistent length and the initial check seems good too. As these are shorter than the main extrusions they should be within my ability to measure using the CNC machine and a touch probe, so should be able to get some more scientific results!




Interesting to see the difference between the milled sides and the un-molested sides - you can see the gaps between the non-milled edges where they aren't flush (the edge that runs horizontal left-right in the pic)




Quick layout to see the size:




Next month's budget will go on some alu plate and some thorlabs precision corner brackets (well, and a big bbq for a new built in project I'm doing in the garden!) , and then the build of the y-axis can properly begin, hopefully with the motion components arriving some time next month too. Apart from the unfortunate corner ding, I'm very impressed with the quality. They are some seriously chunky and solid feeling hunks of alu too which is reassuring.