Quote Originally Posted by JAZZCNC View Post
No it's not massive and is barely just thick enough if your wanting a strong machine with low resonance. Even 5mm wall is only just good enough and will only give average vibration dampening. 3mm wall resonates like a tin can.



Precision doesn't come from welding it comes from setup and alignment, strength comes from welding. You don't need to be a welder to build a strong CNC machine and a grinder hides all sins. Many good CNC machines have been built and welded by people who had never touched a welder before so don't be put off from welding.
That said bolting as it's place because it does allow easy adjustments, like wise it easily gets knocked out of adjustment and isn't always easy to keep the precision you worked hard to achieve when setting up.
My advise is to do a mixture of both and I've said it many times, build in as much adjustment as possible into the design, then look again to see how you can add more adjustment. Because like you not many people have the equipment to machine parts to high or tight tolerences so you need other ways to achieve this and building in adjustments allows you to do this. However you have to think about how you can lock those adjustments so they hold fast.
It can take days, weeks or months to fine tune a machine and it's not something you want to be doing very often.





Nope waste of money and time. As I explained above 3.2mm is not thick and 40x40 x 1.5mm is about as strong as wet spaghetti.
You got me a be confused i have seen over the internet lots of builders use aluminium profiles with trapezoidal connections and reach good longjevity without calibration
Wouldnt five M10 s with proper washers and some locktite give same result?


Do you have some examples of build logs - of what you would define as a good mix of welding and proper adjastments?