Upgrade from drawer slide suggestions please.

[DICKEYBIRD]

Good morning gentlemen. I have attached a few pics of my little CNC router table I built some years ago from Dan Mauch's article in Nuts & Volts magazine. It has served my balsa & ply cutting needs pretty well so far.

Over the past 3 yrs., I have obtained a lathe, mill and other metalworking tools. I'm not ready to convert my X-3 mill to CNC just yet but was thinking about using my machine tools to modify my router to reduce the flexing inherent in the drawer slide setup. Does anyone have any suggestions for replacing the drawer slides with something else that would reduce the flex but would fit in the same footprint and wouldn't require starting over with a completely new machine?

Many thanks for any suggestions.

[Oldmanandhistoy]

Hi,

If cost is not an issue then I would upgrade to supported round linear rails and linear bearings to match. Other possibility would be to use oil impregnated bushings with the same rails (cheaper) unsupported.

John

[Switcher]

Try V-rollers.

.

[Regnar]

instead of relying on the slides for support you could always attach the slides to 80/20 and keep pretty much the same setup. You could probably use there 1515 which comes in I think to a dollar a foot.

[TSJ]

A simple solution would be to get a plate of UHMW the size of your base. Drawer slides have holes for mounting, cut a piece of the UHMW the height required screw it to the slide and let it slide around on the plate removing any warping from the slide.

[DICKEYBIRD]

Thanks guys for your input! I've been looking around on the 'bay and it looks like 12mm linear bearings are plentiful and cheap. Example: http://cgi.ebay.com/16-LM12UU-Linear...QQcmdZViewItem

So I guess I'm going to modify my machine based on them. I was originally thinking of using the supported shaft system with the "C" shaped linear bearings but they don't seem to be as plentiful (cheap!) as the round ones. Since my machine only has 12" X/Y travel, wouldn't the 12mm shafts be OK as far as flex goes?

Also, does any one have a link to a build thread for a similar type machine using round shafts and linear bearings?

[Oldmanandhistoy]

IMHO if you will be only cutting balsa and ply (used for RC?) and small diameter cutters then 12mm unsupported rails will be fine. Do a search for a programme call “beamboy” it’s free and you can do the math very easily on there just to be sure.

As for a similar design there should be a few I would have thought in the “CNC Wood Router Project Log “ forum they will just require searching out.

Best of luck,

John