Rods "Spaceship" Scratch built Plasma Cutter build

machinedude wrote:

hard part is out of the way now getting it in the building is most of the battle the rest is just time consuming

keep your fingers out of the way that machine will most likely do some damage

Thanks, it will be pretty hard to get fingers in the way I think as its got all the latest light guards right across the front from the yellow box on the left.

I think the hard part will be putting the shop back together and tidied up! It took a bit to clear the way for it. Once I work that out I'm going to take the spaceship off its wheels and probably bolt it down somewhere in front of it.

tommylight wrote:

Send it back, it has fingerprints all over the screen !
Very nice.

Yeh I saw that in the photo after I posted it.. Hadn't noticed before!

Nice little franna you have their Rod, you getting into the crane game I am sure that press will pay for itself pretty quickly.

thefabricator03 wrote:

Nice little franna you have their Rod, you getting into the crane game I am sure that press will pay for itself pretty quickly.

Yeh, they put my name on it just for that job. The Semi Driver worked with me in the past and welded up the Spaceship frame for me. I had no clue he worked with that company..

I'm still scratching my head about how to use the press.

The machine I used the NC control only set the back stop. The depth of stroke was set by a rotary dial on the left and side of the machine. We had marks on the dial for common materials.

We made a bench that was level with the bottom die that we rested our brackets on. As the press is upward pressing its hard to get the blade to align with your marks so using the back stop is necessary for any kind of accuracy.

I still don't have it powered up. One electrician looked at it and ran away. I got another firm involved as I knew they had industrial experience. I had them there all afternoon yesterday. They had to do a major rework of our very old switchboard and added a sub-board beside it. They've got power to the machine but it still needs finishing off as I'm getting them to tidy up some dodgy mains wiring in the machine's control cabinet. I'm not looking forward to their bill!

thefabricator03 wrote:

The machine I used the NC control only set the back stop. The depth of stroke was set by a rotary dial on the left and side of the machine. We had marks on the dial for common materials.

We made a bench that was level with the bottom die that we rested our brackets on. As the press is upward pressing its hard to get the blade to align with your marks so using the back stop is necessary for any kind of accuracy.

From what I can gather, this machine has a servo motor fitted there on the left hand side so the stroke should be under NC control. I found the manual and it refers to there being an optional motor available which this one has.

The Ikon controller is 6 axis and only 2 are in use. If you take the cover off you could almost swear it was made by Mesa! Of course my mind is racing wondering how hard it would be to add servos to the backguage height and sideways position adjustments.

Well, it's xnarnon's fault. He wanted to see a version of my new plasma accessory so here it is. I'm sure he'lll be horified by the state of the control panel.



So this is whats been cutting into my plasma development time for the last couple of weeks and its going to be a while longer. It was a pretty big job to get the 3 phase circuit wired to it and then there were a few odd errors being reported.

I had the Ikon technician call today and sort it out and show me how its meant to work. But before that on Friday I fired it up to find the hydraulic pump was not turning on when the switch was flicked so I borrowed a spare unused switch on the control panel so it was up and running for the technician's visit. Then I tried to clean the touch screen becasue somebody complained about fingerprints! And I had problems with that afterwards. Its not a particularly robust PC so after talking to the tech, I marked it down for an upgrade. Finally, I managed to buy a copy of Windows 10 and install it onto an odroid H2+ and order an Asus touch screen the correct size..

The tech showed me what to copy over to the machine so by the end of the day, I had the Ikon controller running on an Odroid!

I had just enough time to review the faulty hydraulics switch. We had decided this was a safety issue as the fail safe key switch was bypassed. I need to double check, but I think I found the issue. When the electrician tidied up, he put a couple of plastic covered screw terminals over some loose wires to keep them safe in case they were connected to mains power. Sure enough when I traced the wires from the switch back, one of them had a shiny new terminal on the end! Well that's tomorrows phone call! I'll get the sparky back to sort that out!

So the touch screen has shipped, so it will be interesting to see how well I can put it all back together.

So hopefully, we'll get it sorted in the next week or so.

Hi, Rodw.
Do you have the maintenance manual for your Amada to adjust the punch and die to compensate for difference in penetration?
I have here if you wantand can share it!
Where i work we have 2press breake from Amada, one i put one VFD to control the backgauge.