I have a new avid cnc 5 x 10. I am thinking about placing them machine in one corner of the shop. Not against any wall, there will be room to walk around. My question is 1st is this a mistake? If so why? 2nd, if not what are your thoughts as to if the head should be on the wall end or the open end.
Mine is a 5x10 also in a corner about 2 ft close to a wall one side and at the end of the machine also 2ft from a wall.
Most of the time I load material from the front and a big sheet from the open side. So not a problem for me.
In my case, I didn’t have much choice - the left long edge was going to be against a wall, because on the right front corner was a post. It just barely fit. The back had walk-around space and the front was near the middle of my shop.
What I did to make this work was to build the machine as a mirror-image of the directions - the big cable chain was on the left, not the right[*], and so up against the wall. That meant that the entire right side was exposed to the shop and didn’t have the cable chain in the way.
I can’t walk along the left side, but I"m getting along by crawling up on the table to attach stuff 
[*] Avid, please make this an official option
My worst crash ever was when a piece of scrap that was between the wall and machine hung up on the motor on the side of the y axis. Your placement will work, but resist the temptation to stash stuff in that 2’ gap.
I have a small shop (24x30) and a 5x10 Avid, so placing against a wall was the only option. See attached pics:
View of how close to the wall
This works for me. Of course it would be nice to have room around all sides to allow access, but this hasn’t really been a problem for me. Removing parts from the left (wall) side sometimes is a pain.
Couple notes:
- I have the rotary mounted near the rear of the machine, so I do access from the machine back a lot. If not for the rotary, I would rarely come from that angle.
- Having the cable track on the other side would have been nice, but it doesn’t really get in the way. When I load/unload sheets I use a macro to move the machine to Y position over the rotary so the gantry and cable track are out of the way.
- If I were doing “production” runs of sheet goods, this wouldn’t work very well. In that situation I would want to be able to have a nearby stack of the next sheet, and a easy way to push a completed sheet to a table to perform part extractions, tab removals, etc and free up the machine right away to start the next task.
I’m not sure i want it there, which is why I’m asking for experiences. If more into the room i guess whatever goes on wall(s) would need to be lower than cnc table. I guess that would rule out chop saw and router table. At least the router table i currently have.
