Designing a better bed

[michaelw]

Always worth trying a bit of lateral thinking on jobs like this .

Why do you need a bed at all ??

If , just for example , work envisaged was routing out shapes from large sheets of plywood a moving gantry machine could be designed where the main slide rails were bolted direct to the workshop floor and the sheet of plywood just mounted on a few packing pieces also bolted direct to the workshop floor .

Floor would need to be rigid but any normal concrete floor of reasonable thickness would be ok . Slide rails could be levelled on packing if needs be .

This set up would not do for precision engineering but for simple routing out it would do all that was nescessary .

Improve the set up by levelling the slide rails more accurately and installing a grid of accurately levelled embedded work holding positions and very good work could then be done .

Purely for interest :

Some engineering works that I visted years ago had jigging floors specially installed . These were large floor areas which were trued and levelled and provided with large numbers of fixing down positions . Used for trial setting up of large machinery and for all manner of ad hoc machining of large components . Sometimes jigging floor was provided with a pit for turning flywheels and a moveable compound slide .