The 80/60 is not a temporary design. It is a negative space design for permanent use. I’ll explain more about it after I cover the temporary frame method.
The temporary frame method is a bootstrap approach. It’s getting good enough to allow the machine to take on the work load. There are many different levels of wood worker, beginner, novice, hobbyist , professional. The boot strap approach is for someone that is not at the skill level to hand make the parts.
I can’t remember who it was now because it thousands of post back and months ago, how said I can cut plywood by hand na skip to the permanent sled in 20 minutes why would I let the temp frame do it. I was very inspired by that. I have a thread here and a wiki entry that detail the use of all my permanent material to improve the temp frame.
Personally I love the look of the old permanent design. I will still finish mine up. I have 2 hammers in my tool box. I don’t limit the tools i can have. It actually works better in my garage. my house was constructed somewhere between 1920 and I930 based on the Sears and Roebuck cesspool kit found in the back yard. That is why I have a garage door 6 ft tall.
Here are the draw backs of the old build method. Time, it takes time to do the first construction, calibrate, then cut new parts, then time to assemble them. For me the cost for all the materials for the original build method came out to around $170. I keep having to go back for 1 more thing I didn’t anticipate.
The trick is to maximize you time. It’s the one thing in life you can’t make more of.
The current new design effort is to skip over the bootsrtap to get people up faster. Besides it introduced 2 levels for debugging then 4 when triangular kinematics came along. This make helping people much easier.
One important point is @bar wants the new design to be able to reuse most of the parts for all the existing users to be able to adopt it.
What is a negative space design? It is my opinion that the vast majority of users will only need to go as far as 3/4 inch (29mm) sheet material. This design is based on that and to allow the router to fully enter and exit the sheet it is working on. Possible to cut 100% of a sheet. There are reasons you might not want to at this stage but this makes it possible. the old design was limited by the sled hitting the bottom rail. I consider everything in the design that is not fighting gravity consumable waist board. The entire outside bezel.
Here is an excerpt of a Private Massage:
The version shown is missing the left and right skirts. When finished it has 9 inch outer skirts allowing the router to fully enter / exit a 4x8 sheet. It’s dirt simple to build, & fast.
The total so far is 21 screws. I think it may need 3 more screws. If you want to do 1/2 inch you first mount a 1/4 inch waste board. If you want to do 1/4 inch you first mount a 1/2 inch waste board. This way the motor mounts don’t need to move.
This is a simplistic design to get you running fast with few tools, it ignores the reuse issue. There is discussion of the distance of the top rail outward. @dlang an I are working on a design together of motor brackets that would mount on the top rail Wood our Unitsrut and make things more uniform.
See here:
I believe when fully complete you can cut on the 80/60 as designed for over a year using under 25 screws. But if you look at it as a cork board approach you pin things on it to extend it’s ability.
Thank you