Joe's 1000x600x200 steel and aluminium router started

[devmonkey]

Thanks for the ideas guys. I went ahead and epoxied some 2" x 1/8th aluminium strip to the 3 cross members that are machinable from the gantry. There is around 60mm outside each of these which will be shimmed manually. The rear cross member cannot be machined as it is under/behind the gantry as Jazz says, so this will get manually shimmed as well. Quite easy to do with a DTI n the Z as 90% of the bed plate is supported by the milled strips,



So the exciting bit was getting the machine to machine itself, first time it has cut anything:


Finish was superb for chewing gum grade aluminium, thickness of thinnest final shim is ~1mm.



I used an 8mm 2 flute carbide bit, there is no scalloping which means the head is in pretty good tram (I can't tram it until the bed is on). I ran the tool path twice, initially to bring all 3 strips down to height then dropped the Z 0.1mm for a finish pass.