I have no skin in your project. As an entrepreneur myself, I STRONGLY encourage you to continue working on your dream. Don't let anyone stop you or discourage you (especially not me). That being said, I continue to be very confused about exactly what your target goal is with respect to cutting ability of the machine. If you want to cut wood, you will succeed. Ditto for plastic. If you want to cut metal (at least more than aluminum), you are going to struggle to get quality results with your current design, IMHO....I could be wrong, but that is my view currently.
Ha ha, don't worry about me getting discouraged. People's doubts that I can do something they think overly ambitious has been motivating me my entire life.
And I totally understand your perspective about clearly defining the capabilities of the machine's work product. But I'll be honest that my answers to most of those questions is, "as good as possible" other than the speed (which is not important to me at all at this time) and I don't know that defining them could really do much to change the design. Do I want mirror polish, micon level output? Of course! Can I live with machine marks and 0.1mm accuracy? Yeah, honestly, it will still work for what I picture myself doing short term. I'm making it as strong as I can with the materials that I can process. I'm hoping the machine itself can bootstrap itself by manufacturing its own improvements as well. Until I see it fail at those fundamental tasks, it doesn't make sense to me to make the drastic design changes and investments required to upgrade the structure or motors.
And as I said before, I'm really hoping to be able to cut steel, but I'm well aware of how difficult and unlikely that is. I would be disappointed, but not consider it a failure if all I could cut was Aluminum. Right now I either need to hand machine metal parts (on my very undersized equipment) or use 3D printed parts, which I'm really happy with but obviously have strength and heat resistance issues making them unsuitable for many of my current needs. So I'm hoping this will get me to that next level of manufacturing, even if it is slow, noisy and makes a giant mess.
Some have said, just go ahead and build the machine and see how it works....there is merit in this if you consider it a proto-type for learning how to get into this game. I would suggest working through your requirements as mentioned above, and do some analysis of your design first, as if I were doing this project I'd want to understand the engineering design underpinnings of each decision being made, but that is just me....I tend to be very analytical.
I'm a whole stage of business behind where it seems that you think I am, which is where I think the dissonance is coming from. This project is absolutely a learning project, I don't even consider it a prototype as it implies others will be built after it and you've already got me dreaming of the Brother Speedio you have. It is in service of making my own proof of concept prototypes and gaining more first hand experience with the process. I'm fortunate to have a wife that earns far more than I do, and I can quit my engineering position any time I want, but I'm a bit old fashioned and want to show her some actual products and plans before retiring and investing the many hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a setup like yours.
As I'm employed full time for as long as I want, I can afford to take lots of time to make a part, and have bad finish and tolerances, since the customer is
me and I only really care right now if my widgets work or not. I'm not making artificial heart valves or selling to customers. Once I'm convinced I have something worth making (sorry I have to be so vague), and have a business plan that leads me to believe it can be done profitably, at that stage I'm going to be
begging you to share your experience with me, and helping me identify the right machines, because it will matter at that point. Right now I'm just doing the best I can with what's available within the crazy parameters we've been discussing and hoping it works better than everyone is predicting. It's no big risk, not big money, I'm being very safety conscious (we'll get into the electronics at some point) so no harm will come from this.
