So those who know me IRL or cyber stock me. Know that in my free time i do have a very small laser cutting business, i started off with a really crap diode laser and eventually made enough to purchase a full size C02 Laser. Now one of the most important thing that machining has thought me. Is that WORK HOLDING IS BASED. Why indicate a shitty piece of bar stock each time when you can just make a jig/fixture and run thousands with minimal work. So i very much took this to heart and instead of spending 20 minutes to frame a coaster in my laser cutter to make sure it is 100% straight. I took a ratty piece of sheet metal (that i paid WAAAAY to much for $90USD) and made my "ghetto bed". now it was handcrafted the same way a child makes a macaroni picture. Very imprecise, and not flat at all i tried my best at making it flat but well, im a machinist not a metal worker. which truly shows my 1/1 piccaso's masterpiece. So i hear you WHERE IS THIS GOING!! this "ghetto bed" worked very well for small stuff, when family and friends would order something i would quickly throw in my jig load up my file and BAM its ready to go. This bed was purely a proof of concept, from the post i saw on light-burns forum of a guy doing something similar with sheet metal. So fast foward 3 years later and i bought plate 3/4 plate stock (which i paid out the ass for) order it to size and draw up a CAD model. a few thing i learned from the original "ghetto bed" was that the exhaust is underneath the bed and needed some way to quickly slurp up the smoke, for this i have a snorkel i am 3d printing and running downward (still work in progress as we speak) and secondly and most importantly! I wanted threading, i originally drilled 7/16 holes to which i just vaguely threaded bolts and nuts through. But now i have 1/4-20 spaces 1.30 inches across the bed, which will make setting up fixtures more solid and repeatable unlike the original bed. i did go with 1/4-20 for a few reasons, first off its standardized and very cheap for bolts, second and most importantly its a small hole. Which then allows me to drill and re-tap if i strip a thread and it also gives me alot of mounting holes. However having tons of holes were also a nightmare to hand tap and debur the backside.
The keen eyed among you may notice slots on the edges of the bed, i decided to go with slots purely because the original mounting holes are not concentric or symmetrical. So F it slots!
im very happy with the bed, i plan to paint it black to make it not reflective and have played around with the idea of open sourcing/selling bed like this, if people are intreasted of course!
