Say hello to the Aluminum Gantry plates that just arrived!
Al-Men (a local aluminum manufacturer in Finland) provides aluminum in various types like larger aluminum plate sheets from 0.7mm up to 10mm in various sizes. They also provide longer aluminum profile bars like the ones I ordered, from tiny bars up to eg. 200x20mm or 125x40mm. Also various other Profiles types like U, T and L shaped as well as round hollow and filled round and square bars. They also have CNC workable 300x300x60mm Aluminum blocks and they offer machining as their main focus.
The Aluminum plates that I ordered were sawn into needed dimensions by the manufacturer. The 200x20mm bars was sawn in 350mm lengths and the 150x10mm bars in 250 and 350mm lengths. I put the order in on Sunday. They replied on Monday and I had the package at a local market post office on Tuesday evening so very fast delivery!
The aluminum price surprised me and was quite low. The 150x10mm ~1m bar costs ~57€ and same length of the 200x20mm bar was ~109€.
The plan is use the 200x20mm plates as Y and X gantry plates while the 150x10mm is the used as end plates for Y axis and as Z spindle plate ( the plate that holds the spindle mount).
The Aluminum bars will be machined with my current small (300x400mm work area) CNC machine so the planning can start soon! The plates should have holes for the linear rail blocks (HGH20CA and HGH15CA) as well as holes for the ball screw nut mount. In addition to that it must have holes for the RatRig 40160 Aluminum profile and the profiles must be threaded with M12 size threads which I may need to order from somewhere…
The planning of the aluminum parts will be done using Vectric Cut2D which was purchased somewhere back in 2015 and on the spring 2020 it was updated to their Cut2D desktop v10.5 and I have really liked the CNC capabilities it has.
Anyways… Even if I now have the bars, I cannot start to CNC them in first hand. I have to buy eg. 18mm and 9mm MDF plates and work on those to get the measurements correct. Then I can move on to CNC the aluminum. But before that I need to assemble the machine using the MDF plates and THEN re-assemble with the aluminum plates. The CNC process will be quite slow. I have milled aluminum in down steps of 0.1mm earlier so lets see…
