🌞 New Stock Frame Design 🌞

[Bee]

I think we need to Fork the design. To - Basic and Advanced. Basic is a fixed Top Beam for people not intending to do material > 25.4 mm (1inch) thick. Advanced is a build for adjustable top beam for users that have a need for more varied sized materials.

Thank you

[dlang]

@madgrizzle

@Keith

I think that trying to make it work with wood screws might be the easiest to implement for everyone.

I think that depends upon the frame design. Since I like @dlang’s alternate 3, I’ve been trying to figure out the steps to build it. Take for instance building the leg…

How do we tell users how to line up the back leg and the horizontal brace in the right spot so they can screw it together.

two things

these leg pieces should be at right angles to each other (they aren’t quite in the model)

use spacers, we can say something like “have the short piece stick out the width of 2 2x4s (use short blocks as spacers to be consistent)”

we can have the default just be a 22" long piece (without the storage on the back) so you are at the end of that piece.

I’ll have to look at the space up from the bottom of the leg, but we can change it to a convenient value

above all, remember, there are no critical dimensions on the legs, they just have to hold the front frame at the right angle and not open up or collapse.

@madgrizzle

If you tell them to drill a hole in the middle of the 2x4 a certain distance from the end, they can readily do that and when they go to assemble, all they have to do is fit the bolt through the holes in the two pieces of wood. Much simpler and less frustrating than having to carefully align pieces at specific angles, hold in place, and screw them together.

Personally, i’d rather take the time to drill holes in the 2x4 on a workbench than to sit on the floor trying to line up the pieces of wood. And the bolts are only really useful for some key joints (particularly the three shown above). The rest can easily be screwed together.

I would lay the rear leg pieces on the ground and screw them together at a right angle, then lay the other leg pieces on top of them, match the angles and screw them together.

then I would screw in the crosspiece across the back.

I would then assemble the front frame (minus the top beam supports and bottom beam), that’s all flat, so you do it on the ground

Then you take the back legs and lay them against the front. The tricky part is figuring out how far to offset them from the bottom, but since the exact angle isn’t critical, I think we can do that fairly easily. screw together.

then set upright on it’s legs and attach the top beam supports and bottom rail

[dlang]

@Keith

The other thing about @apprenticeb’s design is that all of the cuts are square, which also lends itself to easy fabrication. Perhaps a design that can be laid out flat using 2x4 cut to lengths specified and aligned with ends touching and angles defined by measurements and backed up with a template that could be printed out for each requisite angle such that the boards could just be laid down on top of it?

The alternate 3 frame (and my alternate 2 frame) are all square cuts as well. The only angle on them is the back legs

[Keith]

True. I didn’t mean to suggest that @apprenticeb was the only one, it was just the one I had looked at last.

[dlang]

@Bee

I think we need to Fork the design. To - Basic and Advanced. Basic is a fixed Top Beam for people not intending to do material > 25.4 mm (1inch) thick. Advanced is a build for adjustable top beam for users that have a need for more varied sized materials.

Thank you

I think this is a great idea.

I think we should also document the unistrut top beam as a separate option as well

I was thinking that if you have a top 2x4, and use unistrut to hold a unistrut top beam, it would be very easy to adjust.

[dlang]

@Bee

I just added this to the Wiki - I suggest if you have a battery Drill you use Star Drive Deck Screws.

Conventions Table of Terms · MaslowCNC/Mechanics Wiki · GitHub

Enjoy

I like, but I think it would be useful to add comments about standard lengths for 2x4s (both US and metric) around the area where you list the standard sheet goods size (4x8)

It may be worth putting a little more summary info in some of the sections rather than it just being a wall of (useful) links

[dlang]

@dlang

Then you take the back legs and lay them against the front. The tricky part is figuring out how far to offset them from the bottom, but since the exact angle isn’t critical, I think we can do that fairly easily. screw together.

10 degress is roughly a 1 in 6 slope
15 degrees is roughly a 1 in 4 slope

so we can have the person building the frame lay the front frame flat on the ground, lay the legs against the front fame (basically take the entire machine and lay it flat, but with the back legs not attached to the front legs)

roughly align the legs so that all the feet are even (the fact that the angle isn’t critical means that we can accept the error this introduces)

measure the distance from the back tip of the front legs to the front tip of the back legs

divide by 6 (or 4 for 15 degrees)

shift the legs up by that amount, and screw them in place

This won’t be an exact angle, but it will be “good enough” and doesn’t have people trying to use grade school protractors to measure angles and freaking out because they didn’t get them exactly right.

[Borderline]

@mooselake
@madgrizzle
Can confirm that we can get imperial everything in metric Australia!

Sorry been asleep for the last 8 hours (in your future day)

[Bee]

The Wiki is open to Editing - One of the main points is to move to a convention that is clear - Sheet and Stick Lumber are pretty much universal rather than saying 4 x 8 plywood , 2x4 and so on. Please feel free to add to it.

Thank you

[clintloggins]

Loving @dlang v3!!! I like the bolt option for legs too. Could easily remove 2 bolts from the lower rear legs/brace and fold to make one flat panel. Since the brace arms would fold up could put small screw in eye latch to hold in place. Or, better yet, drill a hole in the front and rear legs where the rear brace hole is when folded and put the bolts through them(would need longer bolts, though :/)

[dlang]

Do we need one stock frame design? Can’t we make like 2 or 3 designs, list the pros and cons of each and let the user decide? If there is anything this tread (260 posts in 4 days ) teaches us, it is that there will never be 1 right answer.
I’m thinking one mobile frame design and one really rigid overbuilt frame. Mine is gonna stay where it is, so i don’t wanna compromise on rigidity because someone else needs to move his around.

we don’t need to have just one design, but we do need to have a default design
for people to use who don’t know enough to consider options

I think that by the time most of us get our maslow, we have built and deconstructed our machine in our head dozens of times, i know i have, i’m just glad that i didn’t begin building when i placed my order.

hundreds for me, and I haven’t built it yet

Maybe we should also make a list of not so obvious things your frame has to
have to work i.e. sprockets on the motors in line with the attachment points
of the sled, chain slack stretchy string as straight as possible under the
sprockets as possible.

That’s what I was trying to do in the ‘musings on frame design’ thread.

I’ll reply to this again later when I can take some time to think through
everything

[dlang]

@madgrizzle

@dlang, I was also looking at how to build it (with one person) and thought it would be easy to do if the blue blocks in the picture are below the red beam. That’s based upon building the legs first and tying them together with the cross members. I don’t have the room in my shed to build the front frame flat on the ground (if you follow)

it really doesn’t matter if those blue blocks are above or below the red block, I’ll flip them.

I think you would be best off building the front frame out on your driveway and then bringing it inside (it’s a LOT easier to check for square outside.

I’d consider throwing a piece of scrap diagonally across the back of a horizontal and vertical.

[dlang]

Aah you want to include the bolts and everything in the package, they just
seem like dead weight to ship, can’t you expect the users to pick them up at
their local home depot equivalent? I expect that a standard bolt is available
everywhere.

post office shipping is flat weight (even internationally), and the hardware is
significantly cheaper to buy in bulk. As long as things fit in a box of the
appropriate size.

Also if you ship inch bolts, where am i going to find an inch drill? Places where metric bolts are sold have metric drills, same for imperial.

there shouldn’t be any place where the difference between metric and inch drill
sizes will matter, being oversized a half mm on any hole had better not matter
(because people are going to botch the holes they drill by at least that much)

[dlang]

If we are going to make it so that it can trivially converted to a folding
version, let me make some changes so that the back legs are no longer than the
front legs when folded (will also give me a chance to check the angles)

by the way, this is as much @madgrizzle as me in the design. I may have put it
in CAD and tweaked it a smidge, but the dimenstions of everything is from his
post

[clintloggins]

Thanks @madgrizzle for putting those engineering skills to work on this I knew that you had the Maslow fever when you posted the Minecraft sword for the boys

MadLang v3

[Dag83]

@dlang

If we are going to make it so that it can trivially converted to a folding version

Another reason i like the bolts instead of screws. just remove 1 bolt and everything can collapse.

@dlang

(because people are going to botch the holes they drill by at least that much)

i guess i just wanted to nag a bit about inches vs mm

[marm]

@Bee

I think we need to Fork the design. To - Basic and Advanced.

I also agree on this. I wonder how many people built their frame and only had rudimentary tools? I looked at the final frame and build that one and then modified it so that it had more bracing, wish I would have seen some of the other frames before I built mine. I might still tear mine apart and build one of the alternate designs yet.

If you are worried about the owner not having the ability to make a more complicated frame with their tools how about printing out or better yet have some downloadable templates for the layout of the angles and bolt drilling patterns.

@dlang

if you use 2.5" construction screws, you can easily fasten the 2x4s together (flat to flat)

I used construction screws that I had with star drive and did not use any of included phillips screws. It would be hard to know what purchasers have for drivers but I try and stay away from phillips whenever possible.

[bar]

Here’s my take on the design we seem to be solidifying on:

I made a couple of experimental changes:

The back brace extends past the back of the bed slightly to make it so that all holes can be drilled in the center of the parts to make it easier to build.

The leg brace extends past the front of the bed slightly to provide a place to rest sheet goods while attaching them to the bed:

The sacrifice with this design is that we lose the ability to extend the brace and store sheet goods on the back, however I feel like the focus of the most basic design should be on simplicity and ease of construction with the option to mod it to store material

[madgrizzle]

Where does the bottom beam run? If under the workpiece (as in stock design), it would be interfered with by the brace protruding out the front.

[bar]

There is no bottom brace

I would really like to remove it because I find it prevents me from fully using the the bottom few inches of the sheet when the sled runs into it. Instead the sheet being cut would rest on those braces which protrude from the front (the same distance as the bottom bar used to protrude). We will need to find a new system to attach the bungee, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.