I’m looking at building a Maslow 4 frame that I can disassemble for storage. One idea is to recreate the recommended wood frame in aluminum t-slot, but I worry without cross-bracing it’ll rack like a trapezoid. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about that since the wood frame seems fine.
That got me thinking of cross-bracing. Here’s a 10ft x 10ft “X” frame. (8) 7ft t-slot rails, (4) 90° joints, (8) 45 or 135° joints. It’ll be about five hundred bucks with 1.5"x1.5" “light” T-slot. I don’t really want to spend that much but knock-down is paramount to me (even more important than the overhead of re-calibration). I suspect 1.5" t-slot is overbuilt, but I’d hate to spend all that money on something smaller and have it flex too much. This would lay horizontally on the garage floor; the yellow rectangle shows how I’d orient a 4x8ft sheet of plywood. The belts would mount out at the ends of the X. I think the orientation of this design will align a lot of the belt forces to compression of the X rails. I worry about the 2ft unsupported ends and if they’ll flex too much.
If you’re going for a flat horizontal frame, why not just anchor it to the floor? That’s my plan at first, but as I’m renovating my garage / workshop I’ll build a large island / assembly table which will also serve as a frame for the Maslow.
put bolts in the floor and when you aren’t using them, you can put setscrews or
dome headed bolts in to keep it from being a trip hazard (or have a recess for
the bolt heads)
I’ve found that racking is much less of an issue with the frame laying flat on the floor. Someone else also had the idea of using ratchet straps to tension the frame which could be another way to make it more rigid. Overall though I think that you are going to be better off trying to find spots to tuck your anchor points out to the way where you won’t trip on them. That’s going to be cheaper and stiffer if you can make it work.
