My Newb Plasma Table Attempted Build

phillc54 wrote:

Thanks Rod, I probably will make a reduction unless I stay as my my normal lazy self and change to GT2 but that may be a bit light. The other lazy option is to get a 16T 5mm bore and see what happens when the bore grows to 6.35mm.

Lazy is good. Thats why the spaceship is not painted because its not finished yet!

I was looking at belts the other day and saw that some were not good for precision motion and had backlash but my mind is a seive so I've forgotten everyyhing except that a 10:1 reduction ends up with a 445mm pulley!

I told a lie, I have been working on the table and my pulleys are actually 16 teeth so that is 48mm/rev, not optimal but it wil do for a while.

I also managed to straighten the Z axis leadscrew to within 0.02 mm in the centre, it is 200mm long and was around .75mm out originally so I am very happy with that. It is amazing what you can do with some time, some blocks of wood and a hammer...

So how did you manage to bend a ballscrew?

That was a case of you get what you pay for. From memory the complete Z axis was around AUD$70

That's pretty cheap.

dvn4life1972 wrote:

That's pretty cheap.

Yes, and cheap is the operative word...

Well, just got back home from a visit to family. I went to cut a part out and the power went down for the shop for a moment. I can get the thing to start where it left off, right? I tried but I had to restart the software and need the torch to come on and probe, etc. Is there a decent procedure, or do I need to go into the gcode and add it at where I need it to run from?

I tried inserting a M3 $0 S1 right before where it died and it worked and completed the cut. Phew I was nervous about that.

For a short run, I just run it with the torch off until it catches up. Sometimes, I've edited the sheetcam job to remove already cut parts.