[luke_albers]

I got a spool gun for my MIG welder for Christmas last year and figured it was about time to learn to use it. Got to looking for aluminum on Craigslist and came across a decent quantity of military generator skids and brackets that connected them to the generators.

I have zero experience with CNC machinery - found this site and figured a plasma table would be fun to build

Ordered some rails and ballscrews (20mm x 1500mm screws), 4 cheap-ish chinese NEMA 34 motors with drivers and power supplies, a machine torch I'm going to try to adapt to my HF plasma cutter, and a bunch of other odds and ends

I also got a ballscrew and some servos from a redbox machine. I'm not sure what if any part that will play in this thing.

Here are the skids I'm using





And here is how it looks so far, got one of the motors temporarily mounted up, still need to finish welding the base that it sits on.



I've got lots more pictures to go through, I'll be posting a few more of my older ones and of course more as I make progress

[luke_albers]

Attachment 301184

these are the brackets that attach the generator to the skid, I'm using them for a few things on here, so far to support the motors and screws, and working on the part that attaches the gantry to the ballnuts

[kdoney]

I have a few questions. It looks like you have rails going from left to right in the area that, I guess, you are going to run your plasma cutter. Are you going to use a vacuum table or water table? Will this be mach3 or 4? What kind of torch height control will you use? The table looks good for a router but I can't see the plasma.

[luke_albers]

Typing this on my phone at lunch sorry it's short. Will be water. So If your concern is the bars going right to left being cut, they will be well below the cutting surface. Probably no Mach software but all that is still TBD. For now the plan is to use grbl on a arduino mega 2560. But I'm not opposed to taking this thing apart and rebuilding it o er and over as I find ways to improve.

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

[luke_albers]

What kind of torch height control will you use?

That is TBD as well. Going to try my hand at building some sort of DIY height control, but may end up buying something instead if I decide I just want to make it work as fast as possible. Since this isn't being built for any real purpose other than as a learning experience and for the fun of building it, I don't mind trying things a few different ways.