Well, by the skin of my teeth I have made my first deadline and that was to have the frame mounted on the wall by the end of this week - don't forget, I can only work on this project during school time, when not teaching.
The photos show the wall mountings and the frame in place. Not yet got it perfectly true but have thought of a good way of doing it. I am going to mount a laser line to the X axis plate and place an 8' x 4' board of MDF some 20' infront of the machine on which is drawn a perfectly straight line. As the X slide is moved along the rails the laser line should follow the line. With the board being so far infront of the machine, it will exagerate any misalignment of the rails. If the laser deviates from the line, the rails can be adjusted to bring it back on track. This method should true the rails up for parallelism and twist.
I'll report back as to how successful I am with this method.
Mike
Hope to start on the MDF test version of the gantry next week. |