[calthaus]

Does anyone know if stepper motor wire and the plasma wire can be routed together as long as the stepper wire is shielded? What situations will the arc current produce problems? Thanks.

[vladdy]

if you mean a couple of jumpers for the trigger, you can run them along the same track as the stepper wires...it might be easier to plug the trigger jumper wires into the box itself though..
the plasma high frequency does occasionally screw up step pulses if the wires to the stepper motor aren't shielded...
for some reason i found that grounding the shielding cover from one end [in my case the drive enclosure] works better than grounding both ends...
don't know why..

enjoy..

[Mike@Torchmate]

On our machines we run the Torch cable and motor cable inside the Cable Carrier system, with our non-hi freq plasma cutters there seems to be no adverse effect on the stepper motors themselves. We typically recommend that they be separated as far as they can be in the cable carrier system, just in case.

[Torchhead]

Problems typically come from noise from the plasma getting back into the logic side of the drives. Motor power (coil) wires are not effected by the plasma noise. They are more a radiation point rather than a receiver. I think for other reasons it better to run the torch cable separately. It has an air hose and is not made to make tight bends that might kink the air supply.

The motor wires could become a noise conductor back to the control cabinet if routed improperly inside the control cabinet. Most noise in systems that causes problems is picked up by the low level logic by bad grounding (conducted) an not form radiated (throught the air) sources.

Tom Caudle
www.CandCNC.com