[Valen]

My father and I are getting fed up with our current cheap Chinese mill and a friend of ours is wanting one that will fit into his postage stamp of a workshop.

after seeing this
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi..._Hermle_01.jpg

We all liked the idea so decided to try and implement something along those lines but in a benchtop size.

We want to be able to do steel on it, and the friend is mostly focused on plastics at the moment but would like to be able to upgrade to steel later on.

anyway, this is what we have so far.



Current thinking is 6mm steel face sheets on the inside, with the webbing being 12mmx80mm bar bolted from the face.
Then backfill the lot with an epoxy granite type mix, then put a coversheet over that out of something like 3mm to build up a sandwich type construction.

no real details on the 4th and 5th axis just yet, but it looks like it should have around 500mm square work area if you take them out and do 3 axis.

For a sense of scale, the blue rods are 25mm ballscrews.

[will gilmore]

Looks good. If you (or your friend) wants to do real 5 axis work (not just positioning) make sure you have looked into 5 axis CAM first. It's not cheap.

[Valen]

I hear that lol, he is a uni student and has solidworks and solid cam through his uni, we have access to mastercam, the hard part now is learning to use it lol. Meantime positioning would be enough combined with rhinocam

[rowbare]

Reminds me of the machine Herbertkabi is building: http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85699

bob

[chimpera]

Please do. Theres no good reason 5 axis cant be done for approximately 50% more than 3 axis. I think you have a good design.