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Thanks A Camera -

Now that i have had chance to get myself orientated this morning - i have checked what everyone else's has used and they are all running 4080!

If I go 45x90, that means all my support extrusions will not fit either!

Most are using much thinner ball screws and also running 12 or 15 rails, where i opted to go 20 to beef it up even more.

I have been looking at the 'carriage' (not sure if that is the correct terminology) that they use on the ball screw to connect to the side plates, this just seems to be a flat plate, nothing like the parts that have come with my ball screws

I need to take some time this evening and re-evaluate the situation.

Thanks

WoodKnot

Are all your profiles 40x80? I tried to catch up a bit and went back in history to try to figure out what you actually bought for parts, but to be honest, I failed. I don't know which parts you bought, or if you just bought a drawing or a complete kit with some modifications of your own. Somewhere else you posted a link to this machine from cnc4you:



Is this similar to yours? Now, I have no idea about the dimensions here, but it looks like mostly 4x120. As you can see, the BK/BF of the X screw is placed over one groove, the picture shows clearly that the BK/BF is fixed through drilled holes in the extrusion between the grooves. That is also possible to do as a solution, but if you have only 40x80 all the way then you have bigger issues. Anyway, it is not clear to me at this stage what you actually bought, how the parts are meant to be installed or what the actual problem is, other than the fact that the BF/BF won't fit into the grooves. In any case, if 45x90 is not working, perhaps 40x120 would work. It adds some costs, but surely, not nearly as much as £800 because I am pretty sure you could save and use most of the stuff, depending on the design. Never the less, it would be a good idea if you posted some pictures, it would help a lot in the discussions. Anyway, if you buy new extrusions I can recommend you buy it from DOLD Mechatronic. They have good prices and fast delivery. Some extrusions won't cost you an arm and a leg, and you can easily cut them in your workshop.

I think that the 20 rails are MUCH better than 12, which in my opinion is only suitable for 3D printers, so in my opinion that's a good choice. I also think that using a smaller than 1605 screw is not a very good thing. 1204 may work, but not on such large machine. I am using 1204 on one of my 3D printers. 8 mm ACME is a joke for this sort of thing, it is suitable for 3D printers, but not a large CNC.

If I were you I'd try to make something out of the parts you have, even if in the end it will take longer time. What's been said several times and in several forms is that you must make as a minimum, some sort of plan on how you want the machine to look like. If you do that in a CAD software, that's fine, but it is my understanding that you don't want to do that, so the absolute minimum is to take a piece of paper and a pencil and start sketching, measuring and making drawings. I think Jazz misunderstood my comments, because it sounds like he thinks I am against using software, which I am not. In fact, I do use several, but not for machine design and machine assembly simulation. Even though I am not using any machine modelling software, the mistakes you made would never happen to me, not because of CAD or no CAD, but because I do read specifications, look at technical and mechanical drawings, check dimensions, make sketches and measurements and so on. I think that it is ABSOLUTELY necessary that you do that as well, otherwise your build will be extremely expensive and may end up in the garbage if you just ignore things and assume that it will work out somehow. I don't know what sort of things you have made before, but you seem to have a very large and luxurious workshop, especially compared to mine, so surely, even if you only worked with wood before, you must have made many drawings for whatever you made. I am not a wood worker, and my last wood project was two very simple birdhouses, but I made drawings even for those before I bought the material and started cutting up. So yes, drawings are VERY important according to me, but machines were made long before CAD software was invented, so that is not necessary at all. The type of table CNC we normally build is actually a pretty simple machine compared many others which can be made without and CAD software, so that is not required, but careful measurements and drawings are definitely necessary.