i wonder if sand bonded with sodium silicate could provide vibration damping at a much lower cost than cast iron or epoxy granite? you'd want to use much more sodium silicate than you normally use in foundry practice to get a continuous silica hydrogel phase without air-filled porosity, and as with epoxy granite, you could make the members much thicker and probably heavier than you would with steel or cast iron in order to achieve the same rigidity. and sodium silicate should make an excellent bond to either quartz or carborundum (or other silicate aggregates like basalt fiber)
i think people also care about rigidity because side-loading induces tool deflection, which hurts precision, not just because of chatter
i wonder if sand bonded with sodium silicate could provide vibration damping at a much lower cost than cast iron or epoxy granite? you'd want to use much more sodium silicate than you normally use in foundry practice to get a continuous silica hydrogel phase without air-filled porosity, and as with epoxy granite, you could make the members much thicker and probably heavier than you would with steel or cast iron in order to achieve the same rigidity. and sodium silicate should make an excellent bond to either quartz or carborundum (or other silicate aggregates like basalt fiber)
i think people also care about rigidity because side-loading induces tool deflection, which hurts precision, not just because of chatter
but i don't know anything