Hi Everyone. I wanted to show my progress so far.
My main use for the x-carve will be furniture making, so I thought that some method of vertical clamping would be really helpful. The basis of the approach I’m using is a torsion box constructed of 3/4" MDF with some 1/2" birch plywood to internally reinforce the edges and the cantilevered section. The torsion box is skinned with 3/4"MDF, and there is an additional (replaceable) piece of 3/4" MDF. It is very flat, and very heavy. A slot passes through the cantilevered portion of the torsion box to allow material to be inserted vertically. The whole thing sits on a rather massive base (turned out to be overkill) made of dressed-up and laminated 2x4’s and 2x6’s. With casters the finished work surface is at about 44 inches (I read somewhere that this is a comfortable standing desk height for someone of my size). I’ll get about 43 inches of clearance underneath to clamp material vertically. I didn’t really like the way the X-carve instructions rely on the flatness of a single piece of MDF to hold the machine flat and rigid, so I’m pre-assembling my base on the torsion box. I had to order an extra piece of 20x20mm extrusion and cut it and one of the included extrusions down to 90 cm. The piece facing the vertical slot is a 20x80 mm piece from openbuilds.com. I plan on beefing up my vertical clamping set-up in the future, but this is a good start. I’m going to top it with two pieces of waste-board so that I can remove the piece over the vertical slot when I want to clamp something in the vertical position.
