Originally Posted by Joe_Public  OK Thanks for elaborating. I hadn't considered the moisture / crushing issue. I have a manual lathe & tooling, a good pillar drill and a fairly comprehensive workshop in terms of hand tools. I suppose the fact is that since this would be my first CNC project, I'm thinking MDF would be far quicker and cheaper to work with, and if it didn't work out as planned, its easier to modify. Regarding the ballscrews, you could argue that using a less accurate positioning method would compound the issues of using MDF. Im thinking its better to spend money on a critical item that would be transferrable to a future machine. |
MDF is a great material for prototyping your ideas to make sure everything is how and what you want. If you build it out of mdf to make sure everything fits, you can run the machine and see how the components and electronics work.
Then as time and money allow, build the real machine later.
Mike