EddyCurrent, your first reference seems to recommend widely separated unsupported rails for the gantry. That might be better for a smaller CNC than I plan. The second reference concerns measuring the stiffness of the CNC machine after it is built. A great idea but I am far from even starting my build.

What I really was hoping that someone could advise me on what would be a good gantry design (cross section anyway) using square and 1/2 of square extrusions with using thin plate to box in the beams. Without advice from someone with experience I will probably need to do some simplistic FEA on configurations of hollow rectangular tubes to get a comparison of configurations. Even if I had an FEA program that analysis if done accurately will be somewhat of a task. How about a gut feel comparison of the cross section sketches in my original post?

Thanks,

John C