[austin.mn]

On a side note, has anyone ever put a fish tank filter system on there water table?

The entire thing looked so nice and clean, just before I started cutting. Then after cutting the water was a little murky. Another thing that was nice, having a nice flat surface to lay material on. The old slat holders were a little crooked and the slats never laid flat across the table. When we stripped it down to repaint it we cut the old holders out and installed some new ones, now the slats are dead flat. What a difference.

I also listed this one for sale tonight on craigslist. I think that my friends pushed me to list it a bit to high, 7500 with out the esab or 10500 with it. We'll see if I get any calls on it, at all.

[austin.mn]

Got some bites on my old plasma table already....

Yeah, they want to buy it using paypal and send there courier to pick it up... as they are currently on a boat and they want to buy it for there parents... plus he is sending along an extra hundred dollars if I can hurry with the transaction.

Seriously, I just can't believe that people fall for these scammers.

[austin.mn]

Tomorrow is going to be a fun day of drilling and tapping holes. The gear rack isn't going to be here until next week. So I won't have a fully functional gantry till at least then. For now I have linear bearings to mount. That should be enough work in itself. But, if I get finished with it soon enough I will be able to get started on my gantry. It is going to be a 2" X 4" aluminum tube .25 wall thickness and the 35mm bosch rail. Should be sturdy enough. I had really had my heart set on the 2X6 beam, but it had a slight bend to it.

I also decided to drop the price on my old table a bit to 5g, just table and motors. Then someone could pick up a candcnc kit for it, be hooked up an cutting in an afternoon. I may end up throwing it on ebay if I don't get any real action on it this week.

Still a lot of work to do....

[austin.mn]

I think that I may draw up and build a parallel tapping arm to use with a butterfly impact wrench and irwin tap adapters. I picked up the tap adapters and impact wrench already and was going to just do it by eyeball, but I am second guessing that idea. The idea of snapping off a tap, because it went in crooked just doesn't sound good. Especially when it could have been easily avoided with a tapping arm. I know the Bob already has one drawn up on his site, cnccookbook, so I will check over there at his drawings and see what I have in my scrap bins to make it all happen.

[austin.mn]

gear racks are here! I just have a few more jobs to get caught up on and I can get back to work on the plasma table. Woo-Hoo

[mattamd_xp]

any updates on this?

[austin.mn]

I should have some updates very soon. I sold the big table about two weeks ago which has forced me to get back to work on the new one. The base is pretty much done. I am going to be painting the upper base pieces today. Then I can get them bolted and leveled to the base. Then I will get to weld up the tank and water tray.

I still need to machine the motor mounts, order up some wire. The plasma power source will be mounted under the table on a slide out drawer. That should make it easier to service it when needed. The water tank will go under the table and in the back of the base. Just forward from there will be the pneumatic valves, and in the front will be the electrical enclosure. I will be mounting a control panel to the front of the water tray. This panel will have the fill and drain buttons for the water tray and a manual air valve to move the motors toward the gear rack.

So, still a lot to do, but I feel pretty confident I can get it done in the next few weeks. At least to the point were I can do some cutting with it.

[austin.mn]

well, I still haven't had a chance to get much done on the new machine. Every time I schedule time for it, I end up with some rush jobs to get done. Never fails. I am going to shoot for getting the motor mounts and uprights for the gantry machined this weekend. Really, once those are done I can start to get the machine really looking like something. A couple of weeks ago I mounted up all the rails, got the table portion of it squared up and mounted to the base. Once it looks like something I think that it will be a little harder to get me pulled away from it. I am also getting more and more inquiries for work from that thing lately. So, I am kind of getting to the point were I need it running....

[austin.mn]

Yeah! the table is done and working! It's actually been done for about a month... but I didn't take any video until tonight.
Plasma table 5X4 Linuxcnc - YouTube
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyU9vWuc-l4]Plasma table 5X4 Linuxcnc - YouTube[/ame]

I added both links, the short link version just looks weird to me...

Anyhow, here is the rundown. The table can go much faster than I need it to, accelerates like a dragster and cuts like butter. Alright some of those may have been exaggerations. Seriously though, it does a great job and exceeded my expectations. Mounting the Y axis bearings upside down hasn't been a problem at all. Having the gear rack tucked away seems to have been a smart move and everything so far has worked out according to plan. The only thing that I wish I would have done differently would be to have painted that electrical enclosure before I mounted it to the table frame and wired it. It kinda looks like crap compared to the rest of the table.

I had originally planed to make some body panels for table, I may still do that, but in reality.. I doubt I will have any time for that. The linear bearings do seem to allow for some very smooth movement compared to the cam bearings on the last table. Adding the air cylinders to the rack and pinions was a great choice. It was easy to dial in the correct amount of pressure for smooth movement and I can flip a switch and they free them selves from the gear rack and I can push the gantry out of the way. I do think that I will wire the e-stop through that same switch so that I am forced to rehome if I release the pinions from the gear rack. Otherwise it is a strong possibility that I will drive the gantry off the the rails accidentally.

I used an old series one JR plc to handle the fill and drain functions of the water table. Works slick! It is a little on the slow side, but... I don't drain and fill it all the time, so it isn't really an issue. It would just be nice if it filled in a minute as apposed to ten. I am only running 5psi to the tank for filling and it seems to be plenty, I originally had it at 15 and it was starting to look like old faithful. I also expected that I would have been running more air pressure to the air cylinders that pivot the pinions into and away from the gear rack, but I am only running 5 psi there also. I know on my last table I was running tighter springs than that and I was having problems with the gear teeth jumping. No problems whatsoever on the new table. I will try and take some good pictures of the entire thing in the next few days.

I have some cleaning to do first though... the entire shop has become a crazy mess and I can't seem to do anything but play with my new toy.

[xalky]

Looks like a speed demon. Nice build. I'm gonna have to go back and read the entire build. I missed this one..probably because it was buried in the old threads. What plasma cutter are you running?

[austin.mn]

I am running an ESAB ESP-50 with a PT-37 Torch. The ESP 50 comes with a PT35 torch, but that torch doesn't have a shielded nozzle. I would occasionally have problems when I first started using it with the tip hitting the work piece and damaging the nozzle. So I got the PT-37 for it to help resolve that issue. However, now it would be a non issue as the linuxcnc THC seems to be working much better than it did when it was first set up. I think that the corner lock wasn't really working at first. When I installed the latest version of linuxcnc a month ago it seems that has been cleared up. The PT-35 was really designed to be used with a plate rider.

The motors and drives on the gantry were an ebay special, 8:1 gear reduced 1200oz compumotors with E-AC drives. I sent the drives over to a friend to be modified, as they were modified to run 24v step and direction signals. He swapped out some resisters and I was good to go. I wish I could find more of those...... but the guy ran out of them.

I used a 2" pinion and gear rack combo, that really runs smooth. The old table had a 3:1 belt reduction and 1" pinion which I thought was good, but you could see a slight wiggle in diagonal cuts. No wiggly cuts anymore.

For limit switches I am using Turck inductance sensors that I pulled from some packaging machine at the scrap yard a while back. They seem to be quite repeatable. I will get some pictures taken later today that show off the motor pivots and the mechanical stuff.

So far, I would say this is the best machine I have built for myself. I do intend to make a router mount for it, although I don't know that I will use it. It has been my experience that mixing wood work and metal work in the same shop doesn't work out well for the wood. Metal work can be quite dirty.. still it would be nice to have the capability should the need arise.

One of the first jobs I had to do with this new table was to copy some window pattern cardboard templates and cut them from some 14g. I taped a laser pointer onto the torch and traced the edge of the templates saving points all along. Then saved that point file and opened it up into draft sight (similar to autocad, but free) cleaned it up a bit and created toolpaths and cut it out. took an hour for the entire job.

After machining detailed emblems all the time it is nice to work on a job that cuts in a few minutes and is done. I can hardly wait to start really making some money with this thing.

[xalky]

I'd like to see some final pictures of the new build. You really can't see much in the video. My build is one of the top 10(numerically, not popularity) threads in this section, if you wanna take a look. I'm not done but it's getting there.

[austin.mn]

I should have taken the pictures first... but I instead did the videos and I ran out of space on my memory card after a few minutes... so I uploaded a few couple more videos. You can easily find them by clicking on the last video and checking my other videos... or I will list the links after they are done editing or something... I am kind of a youtube noob.... there should be more to see soon though.

[austin.mn]

here are the links to those videos I posted last night. I did some more tracing of templates last night, a little more this morning and I have to say that is the best add on yet. It was a bit of a pita to get it working, but well worth the effort. I still have a lot to learn about linux and adding features to it, but the more you get into it the more it makes sense. I still don't make my own features from scratch, but most people post the code needed to implement the things they were able to do. I have a friend with a mach3 router that just added a 3d scanner to it.... so hopefully some time soon someone will figure out a way to do it with linuxcnc, until then though, I am really happy to be able to trace the parts manually.

More Plasma Cutter 1 - YouTube

More Plasma Videos 2 - YouTube

The next thing to do will be to make a permanent mount for the camera within some sort of enclosure that has a door on it to seal it up, but opens with either an air cylinder or an rc servo, I think that I have some of those laying around. Then I will be adding an air scribe, and that should be it. for this machine.