just another plasma build and then some :)

The machining is looking good,

I ordered one of these,
www.machineryhouse.com.au/Q670

They are only a cheapie but I will see how it goes.

would be good to know for sure how they work on a water table application.

after 10 months of work the curiosity got the better of me on the machining aspect of this project considering the mini mills on the original base only had 9"of travel on the X axis and 4" on the Y axis my version is better at 50"+ x 99"

So I tested out the refractometer,



It defiantly work for the solution I am using, showing a reading of just under 2 for my table fluid.

i'm glad that idea worked out.

i tried my different drive ratio but it ended up being worse than before but while i was putting things back to how they were i noticed some run out on the coupling so i fixed that and when i put it back together i was getting traverse speeds i could live with. the acceleration is still slow but a big improvement over what i had before. now i am getting about 400 IMP across the board.

pecking air but at least is moving better

building a mold frame around the skeleton frame is turning out to be a lot of work i'm looking at somewhere around 175 different panels to assemble on this thing. the good news is i started making them and they go pretty quickly with the CNC. if i was to make these on the manual mill i would be working another 10 months on these

the more i mess with this thing the more i want to close the loop on the electronics of this build. i have been kicking it around in my head for a while but glass scales for feed back seems like a direction i want to go.

quick question. if you add glass linear scales to provide feedback does that get rid of the need for compensation in software for backlash or screw mapping? any kind of software comp really bogs down on performance. being that i have belt drives on the x and y axis it introduces backlash into the mechanics of the machine. right now i have HTD belts and they are middle of the road on performance in the backlash department.about .003 imperial is about what to expect and the GT series of belt would be top of the line since they are rated at around .001 in the backlash department. things get a little more off when you start stacking error in the system. ball screw + belts add more error.

acceleration is key for plasma so if i have any hope of adding that down the road i can't have pauses in positioning. so any feed back is welcomed here

came across this and this is exactly what was thinking i need. i seen he ran the db9 connection from the linear encoder to a 7i85 s Mesa board but have not figured out what else is needed?