Construction has begun!

Last night I finally started nailing and gluing boards together.  Of course there was a last minute design change to the torsion box, but it was the awesome kind that cut down dramatically on weight, construction time, and material used.  Put simply, I increased the space between ribs in the box, and made each row staggered from the one before it.  This change is largely thanks to Edison, one of the guys at the Asylum.  God, it's nice to have intelligent monkeys to bounce ideas off of!  After I cut all the new short ribs and laid down some plastic to keep the box from getting glued to the concrete, I managed to get almost half of the thing built before I headed home for dinner.

The process of getting the gantry parts milled out, while complicated, is progressing nicely. When I went down to the SETC Thursday evening, there were indeed people there, and a shiny 4x8 ShopBot capable of doing all the cuts nicely.  Unfortunately, the (one?) guy who can teach people how to use it was not there, and it was unclear when he might ever return to the SETC since he was currently in the middle of grad school.  I did make some good contacts though, including one guy from a hackerspace near David Square called Sprout.  I'm going to try to make it there sometime this week.
I also heard back from a guy I found through 100k garages who makes signs.  His business is Village Sign Works, and it's run by a guy named Terry and his son.  I drove up there Friday afternoon and spent some time discussing the job and generally talking shop.  He seemed very eager to help me out.  We couldn't get the g-code files I had from buildyourcnc.com to work with his system, so we decided that the best thing would be for me to take the DXFs I had, separate the cuts into layers based on depth of cut, and send those to him for an estimate.  It's a good thing we did this, since an extra DXF I had also been sent turned out to contain several updated parts that I was strongly urged to use.  I swapped out the old parts for the new, split everything into layers, and sent the revised DXF off to Terry.  Hopefully I'll hear from him sometime today with an estimate and he'll be able to get cutting in the next day or so.