Steel/Aluminium design/build, sorta smallish, cuts ali hopefully

[CraftyGeek]

Hi - Which part of Suffolk are you in?...i'm just over the border in Norfolk.

Whilst i'm still in the process of designing my steel/aluminium build & am not as wise as many of the others round here, there are a couple of things that stand out to me.
I think you'll want to replace the middle side legs with 50mm box rather than the 20mm box.
The gantry looks to be uber chunky - the distance between the front of the gantry, the Y leadscrew & then the front Y plate all look far too big. It's also better to keep the Y leadscrew either behind the gantry or inside it to help keep gunk/chips away from it.

Good first draft though - much better than mine was

[mart154]

Im near Stowmarket.

About the sides and rear end. I plan to fill the sides/rear in with some MDF to control dust a bit better and I actually hope it'll make it a good bit stronger from there as well. With all the triangulation and say ~15mm MDF it should be pretty strong. Bear in mind that the straight legs are only 250mm long.


As for the gantry and Z carrier, the gap should be 42mm. Thats 43mm high ball nut carrier sunken into the plate 3mm and 2mm for good old air. I have to check the drawing. There might be a horrible mistake there somewhere.

I'm not really fond of the idea of cutting a 120mm box section apart to fit the lead screw in there... and then starting to strengthen it :)
As I have understood it would be best to keep the lead screw as close to the Z as possible to minimize leverage?

I might mount some little brushes on the ball screw to keep it clean when this comes an issue. Someone has done it on my Bridgeport and seems to work pretty good.

Edit: oh, about the base and those 20mm box sections there. Base is going to be covered with 20mm ali plate. Should be plenty strong then?

[GEOFFREY]

That looks to me that it will be difficult to load the media, especially if full size and heavy. G.

[mart154]

That looks to me that it will be difficult to load the media, especially if full size and heavy. G.

The work envelope is pretty small, so I can't see doing any heavy lifting :)
Front diagonals should be designed just so a "full size" 600mm wide sheet fits in between them.

Basically, the heaviest "full size" I can see myself working on, would be maybe a 25mm-ish aluminium plate. 800x600mm of that weighs in just over 32kg, so wouldn't be much of a problem to wiggle in even if the front diagonals would be in the way...

[Boyan Silyavski]

The work envelope is pretty small, so I can't see doing any heavy lifting :)
Front diagonals should be designed just so a "full size" 600mm wide sheet fits in between them.

Basically, the heaviest "full size" I can see myself working on, would be maybe a 25mm-ish aluminium plate. 800x600mm of that weighs in just over 32kg, so wouldn't be much of a problem to wiggle in even if the front diagonals would be in the way...

If you have so many steel, why don't you move the supporting braces outside or think of something else.

Correct me if i am wrong, but when you design a thing from scratch there shouldn't be any compromises. Thats the whole point, yes?

[mart154]

You are correct. There shouldn't be any compromises and I can't see the front supports being an issue with the work I plan to do.

I will have a crack designing outside supports but it seems to complicate frame I planned to bolt the machine on to have it higher.

[mart154]

Been busy with other things recently and finally decided to have another crack on the design.

The work area has increased a bit and gone a bit beefier.

The work area is now 890x1000
The cutting area should be about 670x780 now.

Main frame is now 50x50x3 box. The rails bolt on to 60x60x5 (blue)
The green bits are 30x30x2 box to support the baseplate.
The gantry is still 120x120x5 ali box.

So any feedback is greatly appreciated before I start cutting the steel :)