Hi All - Been digging into the Tool plate. Seems the corrugated plate makes a difference. With a 1000N load it makes a 0.1mm diff. I've modelled the plain design with the corrugated front and the corrugated back with a plain front and the corrugated back always wins. This means if I go this way the width is wide and spindle mounting is perhaps limited. So I have to make a decision if the 0.1mm is worth the width or cost as the guttered design will be more costly. But then I like its looks as well. So I suppose it will also come down to how the shape fits the motion parts. Time will tell...

I'm also intrigued with the timber machine builders. Timber has a lot of advantages for small machines plus I could make them on Scoot, although I have done Al in Scoot but it complains if I use DOC >0.3mm. So I did some calcs to see what an MDF, plywood and aluminium laminate gantry would need to look like to be same the stiffness as Maximus. Rather big!! Max is 230mm high x 170mm wide. An mdf section 50mm thick would have to be 550mm high and 450mm wide to be the same stiffness. Now the bearing beams for Max are 300mm long so if the beam was 300mm wide I wouldn't mind but 450mm is too big. It would be a bit smaller in F17 ply about 400x400mm and I fiddled a bit with aluminium but still too big. So I would have to knock down the stiffness target to 5N/um for the timber one I think unless I was building a really big machine. My hope was that I could have the gantry bearings bolt directly to the gantry web with no extra structure. If I changed my design rule of using nuts everywhere I could do it in aluminium but I'd have to thread the rail holes. Maybe worth it in future.

Seems the course is set for Maximus now... Peter

By the way the E for MDF is from 2600Mpa to 3500Mpa which is the same as epoxy resins at 3000Mpa to 4000Mpa. F17 plywood is about 14000MPa stiffness. I choose F17 because that's what formply is and I use formply for a few things. I like using very thin epoxies that are designed for infusion as they have no thickeners in them. They saturate timber much better than laminating epoxies which have thickeners added.