Best rails position on frame in a dusty workspace

Thanks, Rod.

The schematic is just a draft to show dust protection. A gantry designed like that would certainly have some lateral flexion. I will soon make some plans and post a subject on my project.

I try to treat on the forum the different part I am not able to resolve myself, mainly part that are non-intuitive to me, like drivers, encoders, dust, etc.
As a metal craftsman, the frame part is intuitive to me and should be a pleasure. As soon as I find the trick to be able to adjust rails parallelism (my next headache ).

To keep your frame parallel, weld it with a gantry in place. I made a simple one that ran on th eunderside for this purpose.
You can mount the rails oan a seperate plate bolted on and shim it if required to get parallel
For vertical alignment, you can sit each end of the plate on adjustemtn grub screws, then clamp the plate off when in position. A commercial manufacturer would likely mill the rail locations, maybe even when in position on the machine itself....

Thanks for these tricks Rod. I see how t o design my frame now image missing /media/kunena/emoticons/wink.png

There are some interesting tricks used in this build:





He is making a router, based on a sturdy wooden base, so not a plasma, but some of the setup ideas might be useful for a plasma.

Thanks, Andy, for the link. Interesting video with nice tricks to know !

I did not thunk wood routers need so much rigidity in gantry image missing /media/kunena/emoticons/shocked.png. I think I will abandon my idea to add a router tool on my plasma table.
Maybe just add a laser to cut fine wood and plastic, but nothing weighty.

Leme give it a try to explain roughly what is usable:
-Plasma can not be used as a router (it can with abysmal results)
-Router can be used as plasma for thicker plates or lower currents, on thinner plates more cleaning might be required.
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Routers can in general can do 350mm/s/s acceleration and that is quite OK for anything over 3mm thick with 40 to 50A at speeds of 2000-2500mm/m.