Quote Originally Posted by Tenson View Post
MDF, so it's cheap and easy to make.
easy.. maybe, accurate.. depends how much effort you put in. if you are talking about torsion boxes in every place there needs support your talking a lot of effort, is it cheaper maybe.. one sheet of 18mm mdf is £17, 25mm £24 so yes even if you go for 25mm it seems quite cheap. how big are you going to have to make torsion boxes to make sure the strength is there and in turn how much bigger are you going to have to order your screws and rails to achieve the cutting area you want? i plan to make my machine using no more than £100 worth of steel... to me that seems cheap, i havn't even looked at alu but that fact i'm using steel is allowing me to have quite decent amount of cutting area from smallish screws compared to if you made an mdf machine. also there are plenty of designs out there already that use wood/mdf if it was really that good everyones machines in this forum would be made from it, i only know of 2 guys who have made from wood/mdf and one of them ran away from the forum after i presume all the disagreements everytime he mentioned doing something from wood as an alternative

talking of cutting area.. this is what decides the design.. you cant really be universal as everyones needs for cutting area are different.