Quote Originally Posted by martin54 View Post
No the other way round lol, from what I understand there is no standard but on this forum they refer to the X axis as the back & forward axis, (longest axis on you build) & the Y axis as the left & right movement. Z is as you have it up & down.
Reason for the twin ballscrews is to prevent the gantry from twisting as it moves backwards & forwards.
Depends if you view machine from front or side. Really your just using the Cartesian coordinate system which is X Axis horizontal or left/right and Y Vertical or Forward/backwards.

If you stand in front of machine like milling machines user's do then the moving table is X axis and it goes Left/right and Y axis goes away and towards you.

Router users often load and stand at the side of machine which is often the longest Axis. So setup machine to work from the side and match the coordinate system of left/right is the X axis and again the y axis goes away and towards you along the gantry.

When I first put my machine vertical the hardest part or strangest part was getting my head around the fact it was still setup to be used and viewed from side and know I was stood in front of it. Kept thinking the code was wrong because I was expecting it to move L & R for X when it went UP/down instead.?? Very confusing.!! For it all to make sense all I had to do was tip my head to the side and things looked right.!

To match the CAD/CAM coordinate system and still look right in Mach I should set it up so that the X axis runs along the gantry left/right and the Y axis vertical Up/down.
I haven't done it yet but I should really has it's a simple has swapping the motor inputs so X axis uses the Y axis input and vise versa.