Quote Originally Posted by Desertboy View Post
She's looking real good there! What are you going to use as a bed? I'm going to use MDF for now but limits my ability to use oil misting if I cut aluminium. It's a cheap solution of course but I mostly want to process woods, mdf & ply down the line once I've bought some decent compression bits from USA. I see where you corner mounts are (Where the nema's mount on the Y axis) you left a little overlap which means whatever material you use for a bed if you cut it to the correct size will fit snugly in on gravity alone. I'm going to make mine a vac bed so I'm not going to bother to bolt my bed in T nuts in the extrusion but you could do for extra strength.

Are you going to mount her on the table in the picture?
Hi Desertboy, recessing the gantry extrusions into the side plates sounds like a solid idea, maybe i could incorporate it without changing too much as i have already ordered most parts (except the ally plates).

In terms of the bed, i was expecting to use two types (or maybe even 3), like you say - using MDF as a spoilboard for wood cutouts will likely be one of the methods. I had planned to use a similar method for cutting with misting / coolant, our vacuum pods on our bigger machines here use a Phenlolic Plywood and Bakelight / Tufnol ( Link ), its an expensive material and awful to work with but is very resilient and will be immune to blowing out like normal MDF / Plywood when exposed to moisture. I was planning to use 18mm thick, and machine for those hammer-in threaded nuts to give flexibility in terms of mounting clamps / vices etc.

My 3rd method might be to make a basic vacuum table for machining the 1mm thick interdens / intumescent, however i think a few strips of double sided tape will more than suffice.

Yes you are correct i left those angles to help align any bed i fit easily, i will probably fix it to horizontal extrusions but nothing overkill just 2 or 3 bolts per length.

You say you are ordering quality cutters from the states?! Are there no suppliers here? We use cutters from a host of manufacturers, Calibre, Titman, Trend, FUL to name a few. Our main supplier for most of our tooling is a company called Littlehampton Cutting Tools, their MD is a nice guy called David Viney, excellent service and usually get the standard 20% trade discount when buying Trend cutters etc.

Right now im kind of at a standstill while i try and figure out some more fine details and source some more parts, im looking to get new spacers to mount the Nema23's, however struggling to find M5 x 25mm Threaded Hexagon Standoffs, RS Components sell them but only in bags of 50 (I only need 12).

I also had a price back for the ally plates from a company called Berry & Escott Engineering - The final price was £2624 Inc VAT!!! Does this sound about right? I was only expecting them to be around £1000, and i had left off a few small items that i thought 3D Printed parts would suffice for, and that i would run them myself once the machine was going, i am still looking for the chap on the forum here who had made some plates for another build, still cant find it, if anyone could point me in the right direction that would be great.

PSU's & DDCSV1.1 Controller turned up today, i thought the controller was advertised with a PSU but it hasn't arrived with one so i will need to find a cheap 18 - 32v one to power it.

Thanks

Alex