Rods "Spaceship" Scratch built Plasma Cutter build

Nice build, I am building a plasma table for a 2ftx 4ft sheet of material. It started out to be a 4ft by 5ft and build it so I could scale it up, but I decided on a smaller foot print to start out with.

Do you mind shearing your ini and hal file.

I am trying to get your Estop and breakway working in my config, but it is not working, I can't get it out of Estop.

Thanks

Thanks for the encouragement. I have not had the heart to tell my wife this machine has a footprint of 1800 x 1800.
I've attached my config files but they are not a working config but the input signals, limits and outputs are all working.

I've not been working on the config at all as I've been flat out getting the table design finalised so I can get some parts laser cut as soon as my suppliers get back to work in the new year.

Anyway, today, I signed off on the design (to myself). The only parts missing from the table design assembly are the wheels so I can move it around. I'll need to adjust the exhaust fan mount after I buy the fan.

image missing http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb270/rodweb/Lathe/Plasma/Downdraft%20Table%20Complete%20Assembly2_zpsmbbrvun1.jpg

I think I remembered everything, home and limits, proximity switches, allow to route cables through the gantry ends, pull out material trestle to support a full sheet, shelf for drag chain and a heap of other little things. This will be a piece of cake in comparison to the gantry.

rodw wrote: You trust can't always trust Chinese listings. The listing said the supplied pinion drive was for 14mm shafts and a pinion with a 12.7mm bore was provided. This makes sourcing the right stepper motor harder as most in Australia are 14mm.

Do you have a lathe? You could bore out the pinion or turn-down the motor shaft.

If it is a two-shaft motor you can machine the shaft with it installed in the motor, just grip the rear extension and tape the wires up

If it's a single shaft motor then it might need to come apart. In that case do this somewhere low on metal swarf (bedroom?) and wrap the rotor in tape and plastic bags to keep it clean.

I did it with a servo motor (a rather more extreme mod, I removed the brake to make a servo shorter, and swapped the encoder for a resolver) bodgesoc.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Hol...%20CNC%20Electronics

andypugh wrote: Do you have a lathe? You could bore out the pinion or turn-down the motor shaft.

Andy, thanks, yes, I do have a lathe and it might come to that yet. The steppers with 12.7mm shafts I could find have shafts with machined flats and not keyways. I ordered a couple and a bigger power supply from Steppers Online. They say they will customises small quantities so I put a note on the order requesting steppers with keyways so I'll see what eventually turns up.

I guess you are enjoying cooler weather than I am. Its been hitting 40 degrees C here and my design PC is in an unairconditioned part of the house. I managed to remote into it from my air conditioned office to finish everything off. I spent the morning preparing 14 files to send out for lasercutting this morning. Talk about a boring job!

Hopefully, I'll be able to remote into my LinuxCNC box to play with configs the same way as the garage is hotter!

I'm not sending them the downdraft components just yet. I might change the design

Well, I got word from steppers online that they need a minimum order of 20 to get customised shafts so looks like I'll be using what they give me. They have shipped so I'll have them in a week.

I have been working on getting some MPG jog wheels working and nearly had heart failure tonight as I realised that the field inputs on my Mesa card had stopped working. In fact I had finished writing an email to BigJohnT when I thought I'd better check my Hal file. Turned out I had replaced a perfectly good command to load the Mesa driver with an invalid one. Rolled it back and everything worked again so I binned my draft email.

I also added a new wifi access point in my garage as the connectivity was a bit patchy.

Anyway, I ran out of time tonight to get any more done after these distractions.

I will document the MPG config once I finally work it out.

rodw wrote: Well, I got word from steppers online that they need a minimum order of 20 to get customised shafts so looks like I'll be using what they give me. They have shipped so I'll have them in a week.

If the pulleys are big enough you could bore them for Trantorque bushes, which are a superlative way to connect pulleys to shafts.
I used them on a Robotwars robot and we were one of the very few teams to have no trouble at all with sprockets coming loose on the 1kW motors we all used back then.
au.rs-online.com/web/p/keyless-bushes/0814950/
(But maybe shop around and try eBay for the same part, at that price)