About to start in Australia

[bsasloper]

Thanks everybody for their postings here, in a couple of hours I went from being interested to actually having some idea of what I wanted to do.

I am into building reproduction Chinese furniture (as well as old motor bikes, am I confused!). Anyway having hand carved some of the decoration one finds on Chinese stuff, and owning a Triton router and Dremel, I thought naturally I would try to computerise the carving process. I have got a lot of info from this site, and was wondering whether anybody knows of Australian suppliers for the rails, servos and controllers? I actually have access to some beautiful German engineered rails and bearings from old photogrammetric plotters, and was lookiing to using them as the basis for a machine to, at least, give the 3d basis for my carvings. I am also fairly IT literate, but hate programming.

Assuming I have read all the postings, does anybody know of local (Australian, only 20 hours flying time from the other places, try it!) suppliers of the screws, rails and servos that I need? As a minimum, the stepping motors and controlling software, I may have the rails and screws. I can cope with the MDF or aluminium fabrication.

Thanks iin advance. Where I work knowledge is a commercial product, forums (fora) like this give me hope that there are still some folks who like to share for no other reward than helping.

[jcc3inc]

Sir,

It would help if you could offer some dimensions of the desired machine. As to software, it should be easy to get.

While MDF is easy to work and to obtain, I prefer steel tubing, welded into the frame you need, or bolted as required. It is stiff, lightweight, and easy to fabricate if you have access to someone with a welder. Aluminum is better to use than MDF, but not as stiff as steel.

Have you considered a manual duplicator as commercially used, for duplicating something for which you already have made a pattern?

If you will email me, I'll send you pic of the test bed machine which I made, about 32 x 36 inches.
jccinc@owc.net

Regards,
Jack C.

[bsasloper]

Jack,

A machine of say 400 x 500mm. I do not have patterns, I will be making them from photographs of small carved panels. I can weld at a push too. Thanks.