I learned from another thread here that one could invert the axis front to back, and make the axis travel a greater distance. Well, I took the plunge and did just that. Turns out my spindle can completely retract to use the entire throat of the standard workbee and still able to cut into the spoiler board. I now have almost 4.75 inches of travel. Another advantage is that since the Z axis C beam doesn't travel with the spindle, I can plunge deeper without having to worry about the bottom of the C beam hitting material or clamps.
Being interested in possibly doing this modification in the future, I've got to ask: What materials are you milling, and have you noticed a change in machine rigidity or part quality after the mod?
I am a hobbyist and work with many materials: wood, plywood, plastics, foam, and some aluminum. I have not yet used the machine after this conversion. I am converting the Z axis to linear bearings, just waiting for one bracket to arrive. I will keep the orientation of the C-beam this way, though. I can tell you that one thing that really helped is that by design there is only one mount for the spindle. Once I added the second one as far apart as possible, there was much less deflection of the spindle.
