Rods "Spaceship" Scratch built Plasma Cutter build

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.

A few years back i had a look at one of those beasts at 6M length and over 22 tones of weight and two hydraulic cylinders the size of stacked car tyres, the NC control had given up the ghosts so i had a look and asked for 700 Euro to replace that with an arduino and a big stepper/drive, to this day it is in use manually!
It had a single servo motor for adjusting the "length of bend" and a smart mechanical switch to adjust the stroke that would move up and down so the other electrical switch got triggered by it.