[datacop]

I was wandering through Menards yesterday trying to get some inspriation for a hardware store designed router...

I wandered over to the cabinate section and started looking at drawer slides and thought about what was good and bad about them. The good that I saw was the fact that the higher quality ones were fairly ridged with ball bering action. The bad things that I saw about them were when the slides were extended, there was little to no support for the rails.

My thought was to use two slides of equal length, facing the opposite of each other.

The gantry would be bolted to both of the rails for action. In this respect, when the left slide is fully extended and unsupported, the right slide would be fully retracted and totally supported.

The box design would have to be split so that the gantry would be able to be bolted to the rails. Using this design, the gantry rides on the outside of the work area.

Please forgive my crude sketch... I've not yet figured out how to use this damn CAD software yet. Hopefully this will explain the basic concept.