Hello toomast

Many thanks for your reply.

Now you've got me worried, after some quick guestimation in CAD i think it's going to weight in at about 95+kg - is this too heavy?

Re; bed design -The lack of fixings and fixing holes is misleading - I hope to utilise the same method as Jonathon's, after the rest of the machine is built, I plan to attach a large 20mm-ish aluminium plate to the steel frame of the bed then mill it flat, then mill the slots and finally drill and tap it so that I can screw down aluminium strips to form the T-slots. I realise the t-slots on the outer edges won't be possible with this method so I will probably leave them unmachined.

I think I will be mainly routing highly detailed wooden figurines up to lifesize (in 2 parts) which will be held in the rotary axis on one end and free rotating tailstock at the other. both of these will be bolted down to the bed via the T-slots.

The 4th axis is a doughty drive which I bought a few years ago but I've also got a bargain harmonic drive off ebay the other week which is bigger and stronger and will turn that into the 4th axis. I hope then to mount the dougthy Drive onto the Z-axis to form a 5th axis when needed.