Quote Originally Posted by dn7 View Post
Hi routercnc,

the stiffness calculator looks incomplete. Is it still cooking on the back burner, or did you abandon it completely, lost interest? If so, it'd be sad because it's hard to explain how important I feel this tool is.

Regards,
DN
I wrote this along time ago when I was designing my first machine to explore the importance of design choices. It got to a point where it worked well enough and would allow most users to gain some design principles for their own machine. I stopped there and have no plans to go further. For the next level of analysis with more complex shapes you need to step up to FEA but this works in a different way and needs commercially coded software to run. My advice would be to have a play and come away with some principles, such as material needs to be far away from the neutral axis to resist bending and torsion. But in the end the design still needs to be practical and buildable.