A couple of beginner questions... Profile sizes and cutting area size.

[Neale]

Frankly, what you call the axes doesn't really matter that much but you must obey the convention that the axes of the machine in front of you match the way that the axies fo conventional drawing work. As the last post said, imagine a sheet of graph paper in front of you. X coordinates then run from left to right and Y increases as the tool moves away from you. Z coordinates must then increase as the tool rises. For convenience, a lot of people put X=0 and Y=0 in the bottom (i.e. nearest you) LH corner, and Z=0 at the top of travel (so when working, Z coordinates are negative). However, as long as the axes have these relationships, whether X goes across or front to back rather depends on where you stand and what you consider the front of the machine to be!

When I built my machine, I anticipated standing at one of the long sides and so configured it so that X ran along the long axis and Y along the gantry. In practice, I always stand at the short side of the machine. Think of your usual bit of graph paper in front of you on the desk, label X and Y accordingly, and then turn it through 90 degrees anticlockwise. Means that the reference point (0,0) is now at the bottom RH corner. However, as long as you remember which axis is which and which way they go (which I do almost all the time...) then it still works fine because the important thing is the relation of the axes to each other that matters. The reason that this is so important is that any CAD/CAM package is going to assume this relationship between the axes and if you configure the machine differently then you are really, really, going to struggle.

But if you like to think of your gantry as being X and the long axis Y, or the other way around, then as long as the coordinates run the right way with respect to each other, it's your choice. I get confused by people talking about "front" and "side", and who assume that everyone has the same layout of X and Y. It ain't necessarily so!