Homebrew PCBs

Thanks Alan.

"But it's a bit easier to fill the space with hmm what,...  more wood! :)
Really flatness is simply not needed if your main purpose is drilling.  Just
use a 1/2" piece of wood for a sacrificial plate and drill 1/8" or so extra.
How far extra you go doesn't matter much.."

Basic wooden surface, now that's reassuring to read, that's what I work with
usually.  I never made a drilling station and don't have anyone in my
entourage who has.  Since our DRILL files are in thou, I expected that
precision started from the ground up.

"You don't NEED 'flat', just aligned.  As long as your axes are aligned to 
each other properly, it won't matter if you are 1/16th inch off all over the

place for 'flat', you'll still drill correctly.  You seem to be thinking
from 
'everything should be perfect'.  You should always start from 'everything is

totally screwed' and work up to 'this is the abolute minimum to get perfect 
results'.   You don't need half of what you're already talking about lol .."

I knew I could compensate for the total distance, that was figured out
already.  I thought a thou or two on the platform, two more on the gantry,
another on the drilling rail and you ended up with one big sloppy machine.

"Yeah, I have a few hundred steppers on hand.  I can also actually do the 
needed things too, have my own system and layout that can run 5 phase
bipolar 
steppers and anything less.  Still hard to get too motivated, the market is 
relatively tiny."

Motivation, yeah, that seemed to be a problem getting up today.  :D

"Use the straightness that is already in a $20 8 foot section of aluminum 
angle from Lowes, and forget about making some surface that is ultra flat,
it's 
not needed.  Actually I really used a 'straightness' that is far better than

that, I simply used two points as endpoints everywhere it was possible.
Nothing 
gets much more straight than that.  The 'straight' from the rails was only a

starting point to use as a starting reference.  I need to write it up and
take 
pictures, while always a bit time consuming to do the work it's really not
that 
bad to build."

I've read posts (somewhere) that had really made this application turn into
a woodworker's nightmare.  Maybe when I said I'd like to do mild CNC
(plastic) didn't help.  But I do need a drilling station and fast.  Your
comments are encouraging in that it is within the reach of an ordinary
do-it-yourselfer to build this.

Robert
:)





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