Yesterday morning just as I was drinking my first cup of coffee, I was seized with inspiration. Having just a single CNC router on a table is a waste of floor space. I could stack them up on shelves and have two CNC routers one above another and run them at the same time. I'm thinking that the two routers will be completely independent. Each will have its own motor set, its own controller, and will run different programs at the same time. What do you think? Is stacking CNC routers a good idea or folly? Has anyone ever done this before? -D
How about putting the table top on side pivots and mounting the routers on the top and bottom sides? You can let the bottom side run while you do setups on the top side and then flip when it's time to change.
Haha. That wouldn't be a bad idea if I had complicated setup tasks. In my case, I've optimized my hold-down system to the point where cleaning the table and setting up takes just a minute or two while the jobs themselves can take an hour or two. So having two tables running in parallel one above another would nearly double the amount of production while doing setup in parallel with cutting would only increase my speed by about a few percent. -D
A lot would depend on the size of each router bed. If large, then visibility and ease of access could be a problem. However, maybe a larger one on the bottom and a small one, for detail, above it could be viable.
