Thanks for the compliment @MaxHeidrich : I have done a few mods to the machine: Bolted the Y-rails to extra pieces of wood, which are bolted directly into the waistboard. And, I did the X-axis strengthening hack, where you run some bolts through the two extrusions, helping to hold them together better.
When I originally estimated the times for this cut, it was in the 24 hour range, which seemed horrible. So I started doing a series of cuts going faster, and faster. You can see my test cuts and discussion around making it go faster here:
I finally got the estimates down under 12 hours, and that seemed reasonable.
I’ve had my machine for nearly a year and a half now, done quite a bit of cutting on it, still have the original belts, and they appear to be behaving just fine. Yes, something does sound amiss if you’ve gone through two z belts already 