Small rigid router - Design advise needed

[Boyan Silyavski]

Parts looks a lot more bulky in real life than on your little cad drawing. If you go with 'looks about right' on your cad, it will translate to 'way over designed' in real life.

That's true. Same happened here. For second time

I did not have internet for a week and see now that the build goes very well. I will call you if i need to design spaceship

[mitchejc]

Hehe, yes silyavski call me for the help on the spaceship design just make sure you buy big rocket engines as the ship might be a bit on the heavy side :-)

[mitchejc]

@Jazz
Thanks for the cling film plan, it works great and is a lot less effort than the release agent. Yesterday I was mating the surfaces where my x sides bolts to my frame and I already laid down the epoxy when I realised I don't have enough cling wrap left and had to make a plan in a hurry so I ripped a page out of a magazine that was lying there. That glossy paper worked remarkably well. The paper obviously stuck to the epoxy side but I removed it with a wet cloth afterwards. Funny thing is the ink remains so you end up with an inverse print on the epoxy surface of what was on the paper.

[mitchejc]

I really want to put sand in the three sq tubes in the gantry but I'm getting worried about the weight of my y and z. I'm not actually at the point in the build where I'm going to put the sand in but I need to decide now if I'm going to as it affects other choices. I know its a bit late in the process but I'm a bit shocked after actually totaling the weight of my y and z components. Comes out to +- 128kg. The sand will add another odd 20kg's. I'm willing to sacrifice performance for cut quality but maybe I've taken it too far. Not sure if I completed everything correctly but for my X calcs the motor calc spreadsheet turns red (margin of 2.5x instead of 3x) when I fill in my specs but I don't think its accounting for the fact that I have two motors? Will I be ok with this or should I rather reduce weight and not put sand in?

[mitchejc]

Sorry, realised above was a bit of a daft question. The spreadsheet does not allow for dual motor but obviously I can just half my weight for the calcs if have dual motors, so after redoing the calcs all looks fine and I'm doing to fill the sq tubes with sand.

[mitchejc]

Some progress photos. The base was done a while back. I figured its a good place to start to learning welding.

Started with a flat work area and made a jig to get the legs square





welded lower frame



welded upper frame




lower and uper frame done


spot welded legs into place using the jig




welded in braces after the top and bottom frames were welded to the legs.




basically done apart for some diagonals

[mitchejc]

Building the x sides with I-Beam and laser cut parts.

Cutting the i-beam. Thought this was going to be a huge issue because the beam I got is much larger than my cut-off saws capacity but it was done a few minutes later using two cuts and the angle grinder for the remaining bit in the middle.




I got all the holes lasered way oversize and made alu inserts for them. Just figured its a lot easier to ream alu bushes should I need some adjustment later to align things


welded in ball skrew mounts



welded in motor mount


some test fitting just to see how these parts goes together



I think using i-beam for the sides were a good plan and really easy to assemble and I can recommend this kind of approach for other newbies.