[grumpygeek]

Hi all,

I fairly new here, I am building a home brew mdf cnc router that uses black pipe for its rails, so one of the first things I had to build was alignment blocks. I ended up making them from 3/4'" mdf, 1/4" bolts, and cross dowels, which is something I had not seen done before (possibly with good reason). I am posting it here is see what you all think.

From the looks of things, there is a lot of advance building going on here. This is not one of them, I am using very basic tools, and trying to keep things very simple

So take a look and tell me if I did a bad thing

- GrumpyGeek

[Cartierusm]

Well you're off to a good start as far as I'm concerned. The biggest difficulty when designing a machine, especially when someone has never built anything of the like, is to design in adjustment. A lot of the time when we build something using good equipment and anal measuring we figure it's going to come out perfect. Well that's just not the case. Whenever I use aluminum, 8020 extrusions or make something on my Bridgeport I have to check everything. Making very accurate parts, not so they fit together, but align in such a way as to make every single part in harmony with each other is very hard. I try to build accuracy and adjustment into everything I make. So keep it up.

[lobo13]

any updates on the z-axies?

[A_Camera]

any updates on the z-axies?

9 years is a long time...

[grumpygeek]

9 years... oh my. I never actually completed that machine, in the fact I think the next week I think I broke it apart. I didn't have the patience to get the alignment right with those bearing blocks and decided I needed to do something different, I started building a RockCliff Model D machine, which I did complete. I have built several other machines over the years, all in the low cost department, if your interested you can find them here: grumpygeek.com and here bootstrapcnc.com.

[A_Camera]

9 years... oh my. I never actually completed that machine, in the fact I think the next week I think I broke it apart. I didn't have the patience to get the alignment right with those bearing blocks and decided I needed to do something different

Oh well... I didn't want to comment on it because it is so old, but if would have guessed something this would have been my comment.

Personally I think it is bordering impossible to align something with so many set screws. It is better to make things with higher precision. It takes longer time to make but saves time at the other end. Then, even if you'd manage to align you would need at least five screws to hold each bearing reasonably well, but I think it would get misaligned too fast, so giving up on the idea was a good decision in my opinion. I also gave up my very first design idea, and I don't think that we are the only two persons who gave up the first idea. We learned a lot from those failures, that's for sure.