[Yurtman]

I have an 8'x4' CNC router with hiwin linear rails and cncrouterparts.com r&p drives on the X and Y. I'm upgrading to Parker planetary gearboxes and I am considering a fixed pinion setup. Presently the belt drives have a spring tensioner. I see commercial machines with a fixed pinion such as the Biesse Rover J: CNC Router Biesse Rover J

Would hard fixing the gearboxes to the carriages be viable? I see that the rack must be balls-on parallel to the linear rail, which may be harder said than done. Has anyone implemented anything similar?

[ger21]

Commercial machines like the Biesse can't use a spring loaded pinion, because the forces are way too high.

I think I may have seen one DIY set up like that, but I don't recall where. Ideally, you'd want to use some type of jig or fixture mounted to the Hiwins to set the rack perfectly parallel to the rails. Then have some method of fine adjusting the pinion height to get the meshing correct.