Feel free to comment / criticize in this thread- and know that I just might disagree with you, and that needs to be ok. It's my money being spent here, so that gives me creative power but if you want to add to it, feel free!

Ok, so things keep progressing with my other build which many of you are following, and my interest is is starting to turn more and more to metal milling. The concept of high speed machining is making it hard to turn my mind off when I go to bed, and now with some better tooling I am starting to look to new designs and functions.

Enter my new little mill design. Don't get too critical yet- I made this from scratch in 45 minutes so bear with me. It still needs a lot of work, and ballscrews would probably help considerably with the operation of the machine.




Some simple observation so far:

It's made of concrete. There is some steel inside to make everything line up and such, but yes, the base will be molded out of some sort of composite. Have not given exactly what will go into it so far, so perhaps an epoxy, or perhaps something else but it will be HEAVY. Interesting fact: Solidworks does not seem to have concrete or epoxy in its material list, so right now I just have "lead" marked for the base material. Mass properties excerpt:

Code:
Mass = 2864.36 pounds

Volume = 11408.08 cubic inches

Surface area = 11679.35 square inches

Center of mass: ( inches )
	X = 0.04
	Y = 5.58
	Z = 18.53
Lead of course is heavier then rock, but I still thought that fact was kind of fun. I'm not doing any FEM analysis yet, but my guess it it's pretty stationary.

Another note: Here on the drawing it is using 25mm rails. I have a 45mm rail in an 84" configuration, that if cut in half would work quite nicely for the X. I know that the 25mm guides are strong as hell, and the 45's gotta be absolutely crazy strong. I plan on pulling some specs and see how load bearings / flex compares and go from there. Could be interesting.

Third, there is not much structural aluminum on this build. For machining reasons, the triangle risers the gantry sits on are currently aluminum, but that might change. It's a flippin 4x6x14" block, so my guess is it probably does not concern me too much as far as weakness goes.

Also, the carriage I have here is still little. I have not had a chance to update it, I stole it from another model I made last week.

Stay tuned, there is much more to come. It will stay in the digital world for a while while I finish out my other build, but this one will come one day.