Ideas for new fetures for center spotting / drilling

Hello Everyone!

Please let me know what you think about the Ideas I collected/came up with. I'm sorry for the long post.

Introduction:
I am planning to redo the gantry on my machine so i thought about what to make better this time.
It came to my mind that I was lacking a good solution for center punching/spotting or even better drilling directly in the machine.
As i dug into numerous threads and videos i found a couple of ways that could be done and useful for others as well.
So here they are:

1) New tool Pneumatic center punch,
I thought about installing an pneumatic cylinder with a center punch or an automatic center punch at the end of the rod.
A little bit as Stefan Cymbaluk shows in this Video at 6:08.

2) New tool Drill - Enabling Drilling
I thought about installing a second Z-Axis with an electric drill installed that has enough power to do drilling operations.
But then the drilling operation G-Code would come from my Fusion 360 Postprocessor and as Plasmac would delete the Z-movement commands it wouldn't work at the moment. Maybe Plasmac can be changed so it would not delete Z-numbers if it detects a drilling operation. And the other question is if it is possible to change the z-Axis to the other one with a tool change command?
This would help me a lot since I have to drill a lot of holes with the same diameter at the parts I do most.

3) Air scribe for center marking
As seen in the Video i linked above this sounds like a great idea. Maybe in combination with the idea below.
I saw this at parts i ordered from a laser cutting company a couple of years ago. The machine recognized automaticly holes that were too small for cutting and engraved instead the outline (circle) and two lines in x and y direction like a crosshair.



4) Automated recognition of holes and center spotting instead of cutting.
In the PlasmaC User Guide in section 6.11 Hole cutting I read that PlasmaC can automatically recognice small holes and change the GCode accordingly. So I think it should be possible to change from cutting to center marking or similar. This would be cool in combination with one of the spotting methods mentioned above. The Max diameter could be stored in the materials file so it would be saved accordingly.

Please tell me what you think about this.

Cheers,
Martin

As far as i am aware, PlasmaC has provisions for centre spotting, scribe, and only piercing of starting points.
The idea with the drill can work easily, just do not use PlasmaC for that, make another config and use that to drill holes to your liking. For that you can use some software for circuit boards as most of them can output gcode only for drilling holes, and some of them are open source.

Pretty sure that Plasmac already supports drilling as well as engraving but we were going to use a pneumatic drill. TheFabricator03 bought one of these with this in mind
www.totaltools.com.au/air-tools/air-dril...keyed-drill-si2015ad
No Z commands required. Just control the travel distance and dwell for the hole.

As far as centre spotting goes, I have had good results with plasma spotting turning off as soon as an arcOK is received. I have drilled 3mm clearance holes this way that were perfectly aligned with M3 tapped holes drilled on a milling machine when I assembled a laser pointer mount for my machine.

That's a rather expensive air drill. But then maybe the cheap ones don't actually work

There is no reason that you couldn't use the W axis as the drill feed.

LinuxCNC accepts XY offsets for all tools, so a simple tool-change would move the machine reference to the tip of the drill.

For bonus points, add a prox sensor looking at the gear teeth on the chuck and run that to an encoder counter to get feed-per-rev.

andypugh wrote: For bonus points, add a prox sensor looking at the gear teeth on the chuck and run that to an encoder counter to get feed-per-rev.

You should not give me ideas. By monitoring the RPM you could see an increased speed as the drill breaks through the material so then you'd know when to retract the drill.