Quote Originally Posted by hanermo2 View Post
Your project is going well !
Congrats !

I have some positive news..
Mostly ... In most-all alu designs/builds I have seen, little to no serious alu cutting has been done.
BUT..
You can later upgrade the machine stiffness, pretty easily, imho.
If You do need to, that is.
It will be perfectly feasible to drill/ream a few dowel pins, through clamped flats into the alu, and fix steel flats onto the sides of any beams.
And You can even fix them mostly by gluing .. if You use industrial epoxy glues.
And yes, they are strong enough, and no, they wont reduce rigidity.

As-is, I would not give any advice.
You have a pretty good path, and it is likely to work out very well for wood.
And with suitable parameters it will likely do some alu, with hsm toolpaths and smallish cutters.

But rigidity-needed is related to machine work-envelope size, esp. free-length ie the working length of your beam.
900 mm is pretty big.
A mechmate at 1200 mm beam is pretty close, and they are a near-professional tool, in steel, heavy and expensive to build.

In a nutshell;
looks good.
Likely to give great results in wood.
Well done.
Keep going.
If You need to, *anything* can always be upgraded.
Hi there.
Thanks for the positive feedback.
So if I understand right you suggest to screw or glue, in the future, pieces of steel on one side of aluminum extrusions for rigidity purpose? That sounds as a good plan!