Hi everybody,
I've been lurking and reading for several months now getting inspired by awesome builds and trying to figure out how (and what) exactly I should build (I don't need a machine, I WANT one). anyways I just found out about the whole EG machine building scene and had an interesting thought I would like to bounce off you guys.
I used to work in a large factory manufacturing high grade quartz composite kitchen countertops - essentially 7% polyester resin and 93% quartz sands, the precise recipe is very similar to the EG recipes iv'e found online. The mix is then compressed with a huge industrial vibration press under a vacuum and cured for several hours in a low temp kiln. I still have access to the plant and to quite a large amount of left over slabs which I thought of using as a base for a mill i have in mind.
The slabs are 30mm thick and ground and polished to a mirror finish so are extremely even and flat, they are extremely heavy (around 50kg a square meter) and they can be glued together with special epoxy glues which last a lifetime, the slabs would break before the glue does.
I was thinking of coming up with some kind of very simple design and have the slabs machined (stone cnc/water cut) to accept some linear rails (directly bolted on to the surface of the cured 'stone' as opposed to set in the material pre-curing) and building some kind of construction around the rails - i'm guessing this thing would way around 200 kg for a box sized 600X600mm as in the attached concept drawings:
The rails are HIWIN 20mm, ballscrew drives and large steppers, but those are just the parts i happened to have handy in the cad program, i'm more interested in what you guys think of the idea of bolting the linear rails directly to the quartz surfaces and gluing them all together in some kind of box (would be great to have a lid closing the whole thing so it doesn't disturb me planning my next weird build as it churns out parts)
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Jon