Homemade, cheap, plasma CNC

Thanks PCW,

I experienced this with the first version (no shielded cables) so I ended up using Alfoil (yes from the kitchen) to wrap all the cables and the control box. It worked and all was sweet, even if it did look like some crack pot was trying to stop the aliens from steeling my data.

Now the plasma is at one end of the cnc and the signal wires are at the other. The main box is steel and sealed. All cables are shielded and all joints are shielded as well. Haven’t noticed any interference since completing this stage.

Looking at the plasma upgrade now, just waiting on some quotes. Gotp p bit of time as it will be a while before the new Mesa board arrives from the states.

Cheers

Ended up getting a unimig cut 45 plasma.

Now to wait for the new board then I can get it all cranking again.

If anyone has hooked one of these up please let me know,

OK, new MESA 7i96 board has arrived. New UNIMIG Cut45 is in place. checked the resistors in the plasma to get 20:1 divider ratio to suit the MESA THCAD10.

Final connections tonight from the plasma to the SSR relay (for torch firing), Arc OK input on MESA board, IN+ and IN- to the THCAD.

maybe I'll get brave and try and get some cutting happening.

It's alive again.

Totally different cut quality between the $200 Chinese plasma and the unimig.

THC through the MESA THCAD10 is amazing.

Only glitch so far has been arcok signal lost (often at the end of a cut) that I then have to override (ignore arcok) to get it to continue. If I leave the ignore arc ok on it doesn't get a proper pierce before moving on.

I'll try and get some more cutting done this weekend and post some pics of old v new cut quality.

Cheers

What version of LinuxCNC?
The arc lost at the end of the cut was fixed quite a while back, so an update should get that fixed.

Thanks Tommy,

Running AXIS 2.8.0.

Computer is a box in the shed so no internet to it.
I'll try and get an updated version and load it onto a usb.

I'm hoping that in a few weeks i'll be able to get QTPLASMAC onto it and step it up a bit.

Cheers