Todd Zuercher wrote: > We have about a half dozen old gantry routers that work this way. Rack and > pinion drive, with a 2" diameter shaft connecting the 2 pinion gears about 10 > feet apart. Not the most elegant solution, but it works. (one is currently > for sale) The biggest problem with the design is clearance for the shaft, > either the racks and shaft need to be above the table or below. Above is > simplest, but gets in the way accessing the work space. > I don't know the Thermwood, but I can easily imagine some machine layouts that make this completely impossible. Like, rack on the bottom of the table, and big legs or vacuum holddown system in the middle of the table.
I looked at a big vertical boring mill a long time ago at an auction, and have seen some similar gantry systems on other machines that have a bearing at the top of each gantry pylon. The beam across the pylons has a slot for one of the bearings, so the pylons can be significantly out of square without applying stress to the frame. They probably have an E-stop limit switch so if the beam gets too far out of square it stops the machine. The two pylons can be homed somewhat separately, and then when homed, the machine is perfectly in square. This seems like the smartest way to go, you can't break the machine, and if a servo fails or starts to runaway you get an E-stop. These rigid gantrys seem like you could get into trouble, and the homing needs to be done the right way or it could throw the machine out of square. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
