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| Laser Cutter |
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| PekkaNF:
Keep posting. Although I have no immediate need for laser, I'm reading all this with a great interest. I like iterative projects :wave: Pekka |
| PK:
A laser cutter is a bit like a lathe in that you buy your first with some preconceptions of being able to make some simple parts, 5 years later and it's running a filing machine, filament winding and you have a 13 way tailstock tool holder that includes parts from a spirograph set.. We bought our first machine to make one simple part. Now we do all sorts of crazy stuff in our machines and we do a LOT of it.... Yesterday I made some rubber stamps to correct a silkscreen on a PCB. Last week we tried using it for soldering (it worked quite well). We engrave marks onto stainless, mark tools, make complex cardboard boxes, front panels for electronics, the list is endless. I highly recommend them as a tool.... |
| PK:
We're plugging head. Last week we welded up the frame for the top lid. On the weekend I made some clamp arms to go over the 25mm SS axle and transfer the opening torque to the lid frame. These got installed today and with a bit of fettling, it works! The jury is still out on whether the clamps will grip well enough to lift the frame and the big sheet of acrylic that's going on top of it, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.... |
| PK:
Bit of an update So most of the recent effort has been to complete the 2nd 80% of the project and we've just about done it. The electonics and pneumatics are all in and tidy. Lots of little details like 'How are we going to connect the coolant to the thing?' are done: The touch switches for the vac table and pneumatic lift are done and (after more fettling than I was happy about) work well. We did an inital rough alignment with this shoved up the spout of the head shining back on a retical in the tube mounts. This let us get the beam parallel to the axii (which is the most important bit). After that we just translated the tube in Y and Z until the beam came out the nozzle. Hmm, this sounds easier than it was. The beam path is nearly 3m and it took a solid haf day to get it dialled in... We spotted fairly early on that the lid opening ram flexes the whole steel structure so much we were never going to hold alignment with the tube mounts fixed to the enclosure. So we laid up some fairly massive carbon fiber supports that allow us to hang the tube off the optical platform. You can just about make out the aluminium mount we made for mirror #1 that allowed it to be simillarly mounted. Finally we painted and stuck the lid on. So now there's only the things we don't yet know we got wrong to sort out. I suspect that will be a long ish process. But we're not too stressed about it... PK |
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