Gantry height

[Graham S]

I have a z-axis with a travel of 5", I'm struggling to decide how high above the bed to make the gantry, greater than 5" sounds like a good idea to allow for clamping etc but how much more. I'm also not sure how far to make the router extend beyond the moving platform of the router stage or if to just make this adjustable.

I've attached a rendering of the layout, the channel that the router will be attached to is going to be much reduced in size in the final version, it just shows the raw material I have at the moment.

More details in my vertical rounter project thread.

Graham

[CRFultz]

Graham, When I designed my router I incorporated plenty of adjustment leeway into the Z.

I built mine back-wards in the design.
Started out and worked my way in, so I didn't know where exactly my Router was to be positioned.

Lesson's learned...

The yellow and red circles on the pic will give you a ideal of what i did. plenty of mount holes to move up and down. The router clamp slides up and down a dado cut to help keep it squared up.

It's been running good for almost 3 years I think...time to start a new build....this time I will start at the router collet and design out to the X.

Chuck

[Graham S]

Thanks, that does seem an excellent idea, nice machine too.

What I'm worried about is that if the machine spends most of its time cutting sheet is seems that I'll have the router hanging out miles from the gantry just so that on the rare occasions I do want the height I'll have it. I think I'm probably just overestimating how long 5" is (no rude comments please)

Graham

[CRFultz]

5"s will cover alot ...just don't forget about the tooling, after I added my ER style collet from the top and installed the tslot table and the spoil board i lost almost 3"s.

Chuck