Joe's 1000x600x200 steel and aluminium router started

[devmonkey]

Right I've made a decision!

I called around a load of my usual aluminium guys, Smiths, Aalco, Blackburns, plus a couple of local metal shops. No one has any 6x3x3/8 box on the shelf (even Aalco who have a warehouse near me about 10 acres in size) and although they could get it I would need to buy a full length. To be fair I didn't try Simmal.

I've built two previous machines using 6x2x1/4 box and they worked fine albeit I had to shim the rails, only very slightly as I didn't have a mill back then and I had to bolt blocks into the ends to bolt into (not required on the 3/8 box). Anyway I'm just going to go with the original plan from the first post in this thread, will order some 160x80 Item heavy clone from KJN tomorrow.

I will first try to just mount rails directly to the central flat on the profile, if this turns out too wobbly I will plate over the slots and fix rails to plate.

[devmonkey]

I've started milling parts for the Z.

Front plate and rail spacers finished, all fits well. These large plates take an age to mill out on my manual mill.



At least drilling the holes accurately is simple with the DRO.


Also took a delivery of bolts for the machine:

[devmonkey]

Finished the Z back plate so have now assembled the Z. Everything fits perfectly. All 4 long edges of the large front and back plates were milled in a single fixture so these will all be reference edges for aligning the rails and also tramming the Z on the gantry.



Pockets for the ballscrew mounts, these weren't perfect were supposed to be 1mm deep, infact 1.28mm so will need a thin shim between front plate and ball nut holder. TBH ballnut holder is not a precision item, rather it is a cast lump, so probably would have needed shimming anyway.






I'm now waiting on the extrusion to arrive for the gantry as I need this to measure off for the Y bearing plates, gantry end plates, etc. Hopefully should be here early next week.