Oregon Runner
New member
Went down this same road awhile ago but never pulled the trigger. Yes, 80/20 is your best bet in the 40 series. I've installed literally miles of that stuff for machine guarding and it's way better than the Bosch-Rexroth extrusion. Yes, the connectors will be a major cost, esp for the hidden ones. To answer a few of your questions, the rails sit at slight angles down to the side, and are bowed front to back. You will need to make some spacers to get a level base off the rails. I forgot the angle down but the spacers came out to be approx a .300” difference middle to end in height. So if you had a .500 spacer in the middle you'd want .800 at the ends for flat across front to back. A 4 foot level can also verify this. If you have a 3d printer I can drop those spacer files in my link if you want to experiment with them. They are basically blocks that lock into the rail profile and the extrusion profile using the factory T-nuts...hell, you can have any files you want (Inventor format). I didn't detail any rails in cause I felt it would look too square in regards to the lines of our rigs. The nice thing about T-profiles is there are anchor points everywhere. I have some bent metal T-slot anchors I was going to use for tie-down points that would kinda work as well as rails I thought. If you don't have Fusion 360 you'll probably want to get that and become familiar with it. I figured for about 300-350 shipped and a little time you can have a DIY kit that will be way stronger than anything you could ever buy, and heavily modular/customizable. That's with the hidden fasteners, end caps, linear motion for adjustability, locking handles, etc. Again, I'm just sitting on this stuff, so if you want any of it lmk...
