Fitting a 4'x4' Router through a 3' door

This may be a long one…

Our team saved up a bunch of money and bought a CNC Router to cut sheet metal. after about 6 months, our Laguna Swift 4x4 finally arrived at the shop.

There’s just one problem - The door into the shop is 38". The router’s base measures 58" x 84".

So do you get the machine in? Take it all apart.

We took the motors, drag chain, and gantry off, made a few sacrifices and satanic rituals, then tipped the base onto some skates and rolled it in.

This took over 5 hours to do.

More to follow Monday when we reassemble it and hopefully get it running!

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We had the same dilemma when we got a Velox5050 over the summer, but we did not get it with the table and we’re lucky enough to get it through the door with a bit of trig and bigger doors :sweat_smile:.

Anyhow, good luck with the rebuild and new CNC addition!

hacksaw+problem=no problem

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That makes 3 of us! Only we solved the problem by tipping the whole thing on end:

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Make that 4!

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We just built a room around the machine!

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My very first thought on reading the post title was “just push harder!” Kool-aid man to the rescue!

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We build in a garage and our cnc was custom made but I feel your pain.

The trick is to find a CNC in the wild, trap it, and build the shop around it.

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Did you know that a standard Bridgeport will fit through a 34" wide interior door with zero disassembly? Around 30,000 pounds of equipment has been moved through our 34" wide shop door. Only 3 machines have needed any disassembly, the press brake had to have some parts removed from the top to clear height, the CNC EZ-TRAK Bridgeport had to have its table removed because we couldn’t make the geometry work due to the fat servos on its table, and the 17x40 Webb lathe which weighs 6,000 lbs had to have the hoisting lugs and all the carriage handles removed and even then only cleared the door by about an inch total width.

We did just put a laser cutter into a storage room with a 28"? doorway, had to take it apart at the seam of the sheet metal frame and it was about 1/4" of clearance when each part was flipped on its side. Good story, pain to make it work.

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Funny that you said that, because about a month ago, we got a Bridgeport!

Didn’t have to disassemble it, but we had to tilt the head out of the way

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Wednesday this week we got the Laguna set up and running. I updated the album

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Given the 2020 Star Wars theme, I find this instructional video on fitting things through narrow doorways to be highly relevant to this thread:

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