[chich2]

That ducting really fits good in there. What a great idea to use aircon duct. Ready made corners and bends. Good one Russ.

Chich

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[epineh]

Not to mention extremely cheap, haha!

[epineh]

One added bonus is there is plenty of room for other things, in this case some terminals to terminate the servo connections and limit/homing switches...have to say that is more good luck than planning.

Russell

[epineh]

Did some serious hours on the machine over the weekend, unfortunately it doesn't look particularly different so no photos.

I did however manage to power up and run the X and Y axis, after doing a lot of the mechanical tidy ups that I have been ignoring.

Had trouble with a servo drive, I had sprayed it with an old tin of contact cleaner after soldering it up, it must have gone off or something as it reacted with the soldermask of the PCB and made a mess. I thought it would be OK but it seems not so.

Lucky I had another drive I was working on for my mill retrofit and swapped it over.

The plan is to get the machine going without limits/home switches, then use it to mill a small circuit board to use the hall effect homing switches. Things will be a lot safer then.

Also high on the list is to put mechanical stops on the Y and Z axis, as they could over travel and run linear bearings off the rail, not too keen on that.

Still waiting on a belt for the Z axis and also need to connect the servo/encoder, need to get hold of some 3mm bolts 45mm long to mount the encoder enclosure onto the servo.

Getting keen now, this thing looks like a beast doing two axis rapid moves from one end of the table to the other.

Russell.

[epineh]

Connected and tested the spindle drive this weekend, the VFD cable I have is a little short but will do for now, it won't be long enough for the Z cable chain at the moment, but I need to do a couple of small jobs with the machine soon. It can sit in mid air for a while.

Put rubber stops on the upper and lower Z travel, I would hate for the axis to overtravel now and lose the ballscew balls and linear bearing balls, that would be a nightmare.

Not much room to play with but they seem to work and I didn't lose too much travel. Had to chop the lower one so the spindle didn't collide with it, looks a bit funny but does the job.

Russell.

[epineh]

Last belt turned up, Z runs sweet, the servo brake holds the axis when the drive powers off, I was worried there would be too much weight for the brake to handle at power down, and I was also worried the servo wouldn't hold the weight of the spindle assembly, but it does so easily.

Only getting 2.4m/min on the Z, but I have cranked the encoder settings to 1000 CPR, which is 4000 pulses/rev in quadrature, as it only has about 115mm of travel that high a resolution (0.0025mm/step) is all good.

Setup the scaling tonight, so now all three axis are calibrated and running nicely.

Next will be to mount the VFD, I have a small steel enclosure that I will mount at the back of the machine to house it. The motor cabling is now run through the machine, just need to run power to the VFD from the electronics enclosure via the estop contactor and I'm in business. Oh a spindle start signal might be a handy addition as well.

Plan to mount the VFD tomorrow, and test, then its onto milling some circuit boards for the home switches. Going to use the hall effect ones as per the thread by Romanlini here on the zone, with simple modifications to suit my machine, his circuit switches to ground, but the breakout board I designed needs a positive 24volt signal, so I used a PC817 opto to provide this, with very few components and designed a simple board layout that will hopefully be able to be machined with a brand new untested machine...no pressure!!!

If anybody is interested I can supply the DXF of this board, it is untested as yet, but should work, we will see.

Cheers.

Russell.

[epineh]

Starting to run the machine a little, here is a quick video of it doing some drawing, I wanted something that would run for a while, I think this took about an hour but don't worry, only recorded the first couple of minutes...

https://youtu.be/U76qYXkdeBk

[fretman_2]

Nice!!!

[chich2]

Yes...... Very Nice!!!!

[pirate323i]

Fantastic! Absolutely mezmirising!

[epineh]

Thanks guys.

Well the build part is coming to a close, only been about 7 years !!!

I put a few limits on the machine over the weekend, still need to put home switches but for now will use the limits as home switches.

Unfortunately time and money is a little short at the moment so the final finishing covers and painting might be a while, in the meantime I have a few jobs to push through, some paid but mostly unpaid ones for friends.

I did try a couple of inlays to see how it handles that, pretty happy with the results, kept them quite small to push my luck, the tail on the cat is very thin. Will make these into trinket boxes for my kids, daughter likes cats and son likes Yoshi, lol.

Russell.

[fretman_2]

Nice!!

Thanks guys.

Well the build part is coming to a close, only been about 7 years !!!

I put a few limits on the machine over the weekend, still need to put home switches but for now will use the limits as home switches.

Unfortunately time and money is a little short at the moment so the final finishing covers and painting might be a while, in the meantime I have a few jobs to push through, some paid but mostly unpaid ones for friends.

I did try a couple of inlays to see how it handles that, pretty happy with the results, kept them quite small to push my luck, the tail on the cat is very thin. Will make these into trinket boxes for my kids, daughter likes cats and son likes Yoshi, lol.

Russell.

[epineh]

Been using the machine a fair bit lately, mostly timber work but I did have a go at milling a double sided PCB, actually a couple of attempts. It helps to set path blending when you are working with tiny copper tracks, also being careful with your origin reference points.

Any way here is a photo of one I prepared earlier, I designed the board with a combination of through hole and surface mount parts, for easy prototype fabrication at home and also easier final assembly. (hopefully)

Pretty happy with the results, isolation milling done with a 20 degree V cutter, 0.2mm depth of cut. Used a 1.8mm endmill to area clear the larger areas.

While I am happy with the results, a toolchanger would have made life a lot easier.

Russell.

[chich2]

Been using the machine a fair bit lately, mostly timber work but I did have a go at milling a double sided PCB, actually a couple of attempts. It helps to set path blending when you are working with tiny copper tracks, also being careful with your origin reference points.

Any way here is a photo of one I prepared earlier, I designed the board with a combination of through hole and surface mount parts, for easy prototype fabrication at home and also easier final assembly. (hopefully)

Pretty happy with the results, isolation milling done with a 20 degree V cutter, 0.2mm depth of cut. Used a 1.8mm endmill to area clear the larger areas.

While I am happy with the results, a toolchanger would have made life a lot easier.

Russell.

Nice!

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