I cannot do CF either- I went through CraftCloud, but it was actually VariShapes out of Portugal that did the prints. Price, speed, and quality were all good. I’ve ordered from them a few times- I’m not really qualified to recommend them over someone else, but they haven’t given me a reason to look for someone else either.
Workholding is dependent on the piece in question. I do use tabs- and I’ve had some catastrophic failures when they are inadequate or omitted. I’ve typically held sheets in place by attaching the skirt boards around them to the work surface.
For smaller mill work I’ve had good success with putting a layer of blue tape ion the mill bed, another on the back of the material, and using CCA and activator to bond them- but that’s not really practical on the scale of the M4.
Thanks for the info. I put the frame together this weekend (a hot one in Texas) and to save time I stacked the plywood sheets and cut them together, first at the 50" line, then splitting the 2’ wide boards. Last cuts were the diagonal for the wings and the edge cuts - 4 cuts in all. I checked your plan on CAD to confirm the miters for the diagonals were in fact 45 degrees.
Your contribution was a real time saver. I also see the recent thread that posted a spreadsheet to calculate effective cutting area based on anchor point location.
Since I will be using the M4 outside and exposed to some sun during the day, I asked Cloudcraft to make me some CF-nylon corner anchors. It took them a couple of tries (once from Munich, and final part from VC, CA) [edit, correct grammar - It is difficult for me for some reason].
Working on making my frame with my dad now, decided to go with 3/4 inch finished pine and all 2x4s just to make sure it was sturdy and looked appealing enough to me no offense to osb users, just love my plywood
Oh yea its always good when you got it on hand, oh yea one of the other reasons I didn’t choose it was because I also just don’t like how screws interact with it, and thank you, I appreciate that i cant wait to update you on the build, and thank you for providing us with the design I love the hourglass design. Much sturdier looking and just really a lot more pleasant in functionality looks and accessibility aspects than the other frames I’ve seen, I’m a big fan of it
Thank you for this design. I love that it can be nroken down into 3 parts, makes it so much easier to store. Here is my stand-up version. I added legs on both side.
Thank you.
The legs are held with hinges and a hook to store them.
The weight of the whole thing is enough to stabilize it.
At worst, I’ll modify them to change it to a table format.
Next step, proper corner anchors and a “power block” with safety stop.
This was part of the original design, so the blocking was taken out of scrap from the original frame and all four corners are identical- but it is not critical.
