I am a newbie that has been lurking for about a month, and must confess that I am overwhelmed at the moment as to how to proceed, so maybe you can give me some recommendations.
I am looking towards building a wood router set-up for fabricating structural wood for antique vehicles. I own an antique automobile restoration shop in which we have a full woodshop in-house where we make structural pieces for the infrastructure of the vehicles we are restoring. I have included pictures of several pieces below that shows assemblies of individual pieces. Presently we have many patterns and samples, along with factory prints to work from, -and are slowing digitizing them thru SolidWorks. Because of this, I am looking to fabricate a unit where we can test the waters to see if there will be any savings to my customer(s) over handcrafting & fitting each piece to the body.
Most of the pieces we deal with are less than 12" in width, -and the majority are less than 5 inches in width. We do deal with some pieces that around 70+ inches in length however the majority are 48 inches in length or less. If on the rare occasion we do need to deal with a piece longer than the table length, we could improvise by using pegs to index off of to reposition the work piece. For the most part, we use 4/4, 8/4. and sometimes even 12/4s Ash, and the biggest reason for us using a CNC unit would be to cut each wood component to the proper shape, and we will still hand-fit as needed. While speed is somewhat important to us, breaking the "budget bank" to obtain furniture-grade quality at production speeds is unnecessary for our application. My budget is such that I cannot justify spending $8-$10 on a RTA kit, and I really need to hit somewhere around $4k for build materials to make this a justifiable project.
I am thinking I would like to build an 8" thick Torsion Box table using MDF with an internal grid for the strength. From there I am struggling on what to use for linear rails. Also, do I/we want to use ballscrews or R&P for drives, --and should I purchase NEMA34 or 23 motors? I am open to using 8020 material to fabricate the Gantry, -or I am open to constructing it from other materials. I probably would purchase a commercially constructed Z-axis of someone's recommendation. Additionally, is a 2.2kw Spindle with the larger collet size the direction I should be looking at? If so, any specific recommendations for this purchase along with other components such as Breakout Board, Stepper Mtr. size, etc.? We presently have a small entry-level 2'x2' CNC Plasma that uses Mach3, so I would probably purchase this to operate this unit.
I believe the last piece of information I need to give is the anticipated 'duty cycle'. Most car bodies we restore will use anywhere from 25-40 pieces that when assembled would makeup the complete infrastructure. Presently we average about one body per month in fabricating and installing the wooden infrastructure. I have no idea what speeds or how many inches each piece will/should take, but if we used the high average of 40 pieces to fabricate as a baseline, and each component of the assembly averaged an hour each including set-up time, etc., I can see an average of 30 hours of sporadic run-time of the unit per month for each project. Hopefully this gives enough information to help spec out what I need to be searching for.
Thanks in advance for any assistance or advise you give.
Brent