welding steel base or just getting aluminium extrusion

[Desertboy]

Morning, unsure what you decided for drivers but if going the Leadshine AM882 route I'd order them now took about a month for mine to arrive from Hong Kong.

You can buy EU equivalent Leadshine EM806's but they're twice the price and the specifications seem identical both made by leadshine. AM882's you will not find available from UK seller if you do link me to him please lol so i can buy another 4. The only difference I can see between the EM806 and AM882 is they have different dip switch settings relating to auto motor setup but both support autotuning making this an non issue.

Don't buy 2nd hand like I did didn't save enough money to pay for the non working one I got I ended up buying a new one for £60 delivered, quick tip reduce the chances of important tax by making 4 separate orders to 2 different address's.

Personally I'd order the Hiwin's and ballscrew in at same time and from personal experience this time I would make the Hiwin's 20cm longer than the ballscrews. I'd want the Hiwin's and ballscrews before I started to make the frame after all the frame has to fit the Hiwin's and ballscrews not the other way round. You can't practically cut ballscrews down I rang a company in Leicester that specialise in ballscrew repairs to see how much to end machine a ballscrew was. It was about twice the price of buying the ballscrew from China with BK/BF fittings for the machining only.

If I had to order the Hiwin rail in UK I would use cncforyou which sells original carriages but a clone rail but I would just order from China/HK as my experiences so far have been mostly positive.