New build with recycled parts on a ridiculous budget 120cm*60cm work area

[Desertboy]

Had a quote back for 2020 ballscrew, 2m long with fittings 3 of them just under £500 delivered to UK, (Will be £100-£150 in import tax on top). I should probably just build a new router square with 1.8m*1.8m (Going to need a strong gantry) with steppers for my 2nd router I can get some Nema 34's for £5 each off a mate who has a dolab full of them lol for Y and drop a 4nm nema 23 from cnc4you for the X. This is a lot more doable in the short term than dual gantry with servos all round lol. It's Chinese New year so I can't order for a month, well I can but nothing will be posted for a month. So have a month to think about thing before rushing in lol. 1.8m travel is what I'm after having it on both axis would be truly amazing. I've been doing a lot of test cutting now on my machine for the things I want to build and I know I need at least 10m/min cutting speed to stand a chance of making money on it. What I want to build uses 2 types of wood and I actually couldn't fit it on a 1.8m*1.8m bed to cut it in 1 but if I keep the original machine as well then I could run them side by side and make the item in 1 run giving me a fighting chance lol.

I would love to build a dual gantry machine but having spoken to some people on the linuxcnc forums it seems the software just isn't there to take real advantage of it. So in the end I'd be building essentially 2 cnc machines in one frame I could get it to clone easy enough (Parallel port switch) but even that would have dubios advantages as you loose homing on 1 of the machines. After all if I have 2 controllers it's not hard to run the same code on both and then have homing and forget the cloning. I can still see an advantage to have a dual gantry with a shared area if 1 is R&P powered and the other ballscrew and you only work 1 gantry at a time. Would be easy to use a limit switch so if the gantry not in use is not parked then power to the other gantry is off. 1 gantry for speed and 1 for aluminium. They could then share electronics at least if I can find the right switches after all I only need to switch 4 wires for each stepper which would be 2 sets for this setup (X&Z). It very easy in linuxcnc to have multiple profiles for the machine so wouldn't be hard to configure. This way sharing the rail, frame, electronics & controller you're saving a lot of money and floor space to get essentially 2 machines.

Maybe build No. 3 will be dual gantry ;)