CNC Plasma cutters, DIY, building info and guide

That is quite easy to avoid when building a new machine, just hide the belts behind rails or frame. Not easy on an existing machine.
Although they can work without a hitch even without cleaning for over 3 years and not covered at all! I had such a customer!
Having them near the torch is a no no.
I do not know what Xcarve uses as linear slides, but those chinese rollers on aluminium extrusion will be done with inside of a week of heavy usage on a plasma machine.

Been long enough !
Sorry for the delay but the friend that was providing parts for me from Germany is back in Kosovo so i am having difficulties sourcing parts, but at least now i order a lot more so i gathered a nice pile of Mesa boards, Lam Technologies and other types of drives, lots of power supplies, and finaly yesterday got a delivery of 6 meter long round supported rails at 16, 20 and 30mm with respective carriages. Took 2 months to have them here! Next shipment will be here a week after i order, so that is one less problem.
Now i have to do some calculations and some drawings to first check how much i can squeeze with what i already got then order a lot of metal profiles ( IF i can manage to gather some money as i am almost broke! ) .
I have :
Linear round supported rails:
16mm 6 meters plus 12 carriages with holders and 16 without holders.
20mm 6 meters plus 12 carriages with holders.
30mm 15 meters plus 15 carriages with holders.
Linear rails square
Hiwin HGR25
1 piece 118cm long
1 piece 78cm long
1 piece ~55cm long
1 single carriage.

I need to build:
1 small machine at 2X1 meter cut area.
1 medium machine at 3X2 or 3X1.5 meters cut area.
1 big machine at 6X2 meters cut area.

The big machine will use the above mentioned 30mm supported rails for the Y axis, meaning having to cut the 3 meter piece and but join it to the 6 meter ones to get 7.5 meters of rails on both sides, planing on making the gantry very wide at 60 to 100cm, so that will end up with 6.5 to 6.9 meters of cut area.
Now comes the tricky part, i would like to use the HiWin for the X axis, but, but joining square linear rails in a "hand tools" work shop is a no go, so any ideas are very welcomed. This would leave the 20mm and 16mm ones for the other 2 machines to play with, but no matter how i look at it, i will need some more rails. Luckily i have a local source for unsupported round rails ( local hydraulic equipment service ) and a local bearings shop that has a stock of carriages for round rails and rack and pinion module 2 just for me !
Since this is a joint venture, can someone please do a drawing or a render or a scrible of how a plasma machine should look like as a finished product. Not the standard ones. It has to look as a piece of art, not a square box. Even some nice decals will do, if it contains the words: Linuxcnc and Mesa, and maybe, just maybe a company name ( i do own localy " Kosova Hardware" and " PC Kosova ", the first is usable but to long ).
As i have access to a lot of local busineses, printing on anything, plastic sheets, and some other stuff is easy, good paint job is very hard so i have to use car repair shops that costs a lot, but i have to go that route.
More to come.
Regards,
Tom.

there are nice sets for 1500mm mashines on the market
also very good working 1300mm square rails cheep ballscrew sets


BUT what i think there is a individuell need
as here we got sheeds at 2500x1500
and also low standard at 2000x1250
so a need to fit tables

you can order sheets as you like in main mesurmands as standard
you woudt also like to go cheep standards to fit your table on mass use

hobbyists or education may prefer small mashines that can be moved as 500x500mm is a real comen one

pl7i92 wrote: there are nice sets for 1500mm mashines on the market
also very good working 1300mm square rails cheep ballscrew sets

Looked at them, they do look ( and are ) cheap untill you try to order them, then you get the 935$ shipping so they are not cheap anymore. And the quality is really terible for the ballscrews. They are usable, but not anywhere near some NSK's i got.

pl7i92 wrote: BUT what i think there is a individuell need
as here we got sheeds at 2500x1500
and also low standard at 2000x1250
so a need to fit tables

Here the standard sheet is 2000X1000mm, then 2500X1250, 3000X1250 and 6000X2000. Rarely there are 3000X1500mm.

No ideas ? Drawings ? Scribles ? Nothing ???
Oh well, been thinking about how to mount the rails so that they are covered completely to protect from fine dust and debree while working around the table, came up with an idea and have some chicken scratches i made on the phone ( the Galaxy Note pen is such a nice thing ), so i will try to upload that now.


Not much to look at buy a rough idea.
Regards,
Tom

i have plans to add bellows from ballistic nylon that are sewn together. i started putting some pieces together and it seems like the idea will work well so far. the section i am working on is the section across the gantry so those will be very long to cover everything. the nice part about bellows is they don't take up very much space when closed up. very expensive to buy but making them is pretty cheap but just takes a lot of time making them.

every machine is different so i would think things would change to some degree between machine designs but bellows seem like the best solution to me at this point.

one thing that caught my attention from the start was how long machine torches are so mounting those up high to keep as much distance from the rails as possible seems like good practice in general. since water tables are a popular choice. i seen people taking silicone check valves from Fram oil filters to use as splash guards on the torches too to keep the mess down from splashing.