Just starting out - quick question

[glynster]

That's a hugely impressive looking bit of precision engineered aluminium. I have given up on the idea of buying a model machine to make parts - strikes me I could roughly make any parts out of MDF and then use the main machine to make better parts for itself later. Is that 15 or 20mm aluminium? Isnt that overkill?

[Wal]

Isnt that overkill?

Heh. No such thing..! Or to look at it another way - if you can't do the maths, make it as strong as you can afford to...

Yep, it's 20mm 6082 Ecocast plate from Aluminium Warehouse. This is to ensure maximum flatness across the faces that the hardware gets mounted to. Believe it or not, there can be a fair bit of variation across a large chunk of plate. Not what you want if things are going to line up as best they can.

While the holes are drilled accurately, if you look at the edges of the plate you can see saw marks. The plates themselves weren't milled to size, just machine sawn to ±1mm of the dimensions I needed. Profile milling the plate edges in relation to the holes would have been a better approach (easier to square the plates relative to each other with the right gear) but it would have cost a fair bit more. Squaring was reasonably straight forward as it happened and I didn't use any specialist equipment beyond engineers squares and dial guages. Sure, we're not talking aerospace tolerances, but for what I'm doing it's almost certainly as good as it needs to be.

Wal.