Retrofit of 2 Messer Cortina DS Plasma cutting machines

Yea, these are going slow for my liking as i can work only 2 to 4 hours a day there.
Just removing cables took 5 of those short days, another day to tidy up the remaing ones.
The small one is fully installed, both axis tuned, loop closed in LinuxCNC as i never trusted Geckos G320 with their 128 encoder counts error bandwidth.
Limit switches are wired but i have to add some load to them, they are 2 wire ones.
And Z axis, mount a new motor or add an encoder to the existing motor.
In a few days, the work on the big one starts, way more cables to remove!
More fun!

tommylight wrote:

Big one has two Z axis that i have to yank out tomorrow to check what is inside, .....

Surprise, surprise, both have what look like rolled ballscrews, 16mm ones! Daymn, those just have the chance of being very easy to replace the motors.
On the smaller one, took the Z motor out, removed the tacho, adding a 100PPR encoder, and installing another Gecko 320, tomorrow, had a headache today, i can not do complicated stuff while head is hurting.

How the hell is Samsung Note 20 Ultra able to take such good pictures, it was to damn dark there.
I took the fist picture in the original post at day time with a Note 9, they look like cr@p.
Got the sensors wired today, homing, tandem axis/joints, limits, all done. Work area got to be 2450x6550mm with the extension they did.
Also mounted the existing servo motor on the Z axis and added an encoder, it was a very tight fit, but we did shoehorn it there!
They were extremely happy today jogging the machine around, had to drag the younger one from the machine just to take pictures.

The first/smaller one is almost done, need to add voltage dividers and zener diodes to newly installed encoder on Z axis, and add 2 of 1MOhm resistors for THCAD.
All the sensors are wired and tested, float, breakaway, both Z limits, both X limits, both Y limits.
Hypertherm is also wired, torch on works, arc ok works, but some dumb a$$ yanked out the divider and wired the torch voltage, i have only THCAD 10's.
There were sparks as we tested arc ok by holding a plate near the torch, so the only thing left is more sparks tomorrow!
Regards,
Tom.

done quickly !!! What gear ratio are you using for the z axis? I put a small reducer but it has a small backlash and deceives the thcad... I'll have to put the toothed pulley and belt

1 down, 1 to go!
Did roughly 2 hours of test cutting today, not a single issue.
Here's the last shot of the innards, probably not the last:

And a quick and dirty video: