Help Finding Plans for Wood Table

[ron_moorehead]

I any looking at buying a new shopbot mostly one of the PRT96 they have left. I have seen links and discussions about plans for building a wooden table, but can not find the plans on the web site, looks like all the plans are for assembling a steel PRTAlpha table. Can anyone help me find the plans Shopbot has or the plans you have used. Thanks..

[andyb]

You're right. Shopbot must have removed them for the website. I just purchased my bot. I've have had it up and running for 2 week. I went with a steel table. I bought the steel and had a friend weld it for me. I would suggest going with steel. I has going to go with wood but after reading all the comments in the forum decided on steel. I'm glad I did. The cost of everything was about $400 and that was for 3/8' steel tubing plus the C channel. Since my friend welded it there was no cost for labor. You can take the plans for the steel table to a metal shop and have them price it for you. If you still want to go with wood I have the plans for the wood table. Shoot me an email and I will send them to you. abrooks60ATcharterDOTnet.

Andy B.

[ted]

Hi Ron & Andy,

Ah, I see someone noticed we did take the wood table plans down. We removed them with a bit of mixed emotion because we really like the idea of people digging in and doing there own thing. But we've had a couple cases that were problematic where people built wood tables for their PRTalphas. It's not something that we encourage, and it would take a very stiff and well-built wood table to support full speed production work at PRTalpha speeds. So, to try and avoid these kinds of issues in the future we thought the most prudent thing to do was to only encourage steel tables.

But Andy has the right idea, a very solid steel table can be made by a good welder, and it is possible to save some money this way. We put our plans for tables on the website to facilitate just this kind of do-it-yourself approach to keeping CNC affordable. Our idea was not that someone would duplicate our table. We designed it as a bolt-together for affordable shipping and so that you can get it into unusual locations. But using the overall dimensions and spacing that are in our plans, you can build a welded one for less money. Just remember ... it is very important that you paint it blue.

-Ted