Titivating a Wire EDM Machine

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awemawson:
On the actual cover I will use half nuts pressed from below to leave a ledge for strength - that was a full nut that started as 3 mm thick but got squashed to 2.3 mm > Needless to say I had to re-thread it !

I will need some M4 x 4 mm csk screws that I cannot find commercially so I shortened some 6 mm ones using a springy clamp made from two bits of 1 mm stainless and an angle grinder !

Manxmodder:
Hi Andrew, this is a very interesting project. Something I have wondered about EDM machines is how much wire do they use during cutting and how expensive is replacement wire?......OZ.

awemawson:
Well Oz, I got this machine in 2011 and I'm still on the original 8 kg roll :ddb:

But in all honesty that's no real judge as it's not been used much. I've bought various reels as they turn up on eBay but now I have quite a stock so am rather discerning on what I pay now - for instance one sold on ebay for £23 the other day, but with postage at £15 £38 was more than I was prepared to pay. I think it is not much more than that from a dealer.

***(later edit ... I'm wrong it's £115 plus VAT for 8 kgs and it has 2400 metres on it :bugeye: )***

There is a heck of a lot of 0.25 mm brass wire on an 8 kg spool - I've also got several 16 kg ones :bugeye:

awemawson:
At long last I think I've sorted the sliding cover fixing.

The pressed in nuts seem to work a treat, and I ended up pressing in 'half nuts' which in M4 measured 2.09 mm thick - pretty well ideal for the 2 mm sheet that I'm working with. It was a bit of a fiddle balancing the cover on the press but I got there in the end.

With my truncated screws there is no projecting below the panel - so hopefully jamming will be a thing of the past.

awemawson:
Replacement 10 x 8 mm aluminium bar arrived today so at last I've re-made that mangled kerb, and re-fitted the sliding covers. They seems to slide nicely with no bits catching this time (fingers crossed) - I've been up to the axis limits in all directions.

It's taken a while for two reasons - firstly deciding on the cover joining method and experimenting with it, and secondly waiting for the bar stock and stainless M4 half nuts to arrive. Covers will have to come back off in a few weeks for painting, but I'll treat that as a separate job as several panels need painting.

Meanwhile I've been refreshing my memory uploading and downloading code to the machine from a PC. As I have three CNC machines and the PC only has one serial port I use a switch box to switch the RS232 source - simple enough - but when I came to set up my DNC software (NClite V7) it insists on each CNC machine having a different COM port number :bang: I could expand the number of COM ports using a USB adaptor but don't really want the timing issues that that may introduce. Awaiting response to my query from India where NClite is written :bugeye:

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