Steady away.
Safety first.
Those digits are single issue only.

Yes, had the order of the cashless boot several times during my career.
Chin up and soldier on.:)

Wow, just as my thread title changes to "started" I finished up grinding all the rails today. My neighbors are definitely thankful for that :)

This avo I countersunk gantry end plates, drilled both the clamp strip and gantry tubes and did an initial fitting of the gantry parts all ready to start welding it up on Monday. I bought a 2 meter level and levelled up the machine to give me a good base to weld the gantry up on.

No work tomorrow on the machine, off to the Top Gear Festival tomorrow for my motoring fix :)

You're moving along great! It took me 14 pages of chatter on my thread before I got her running. Enjoy your festival.:)

Went electrical shopping today and $317 later I have a control box, contactor etc. The only thing missing is the illuminated on/off button which has to come from Hong Kong because shipping one ex US would cost too much. When I am bored by construction I can now start putting the control together. I will be running a 24VDC circuit to run fans, e-stop etc so I can restrict 240V to inside the control box instead of running it around the table.

Not much left to buy now, I am thinking a little paint, primer, rustkill and a couple of sheets of MDF for the spoilboard and I will have everything I need to finish this thing! etc

Quick Q for everyone, have I got the gantry together the right way for the 0,0 position I have selected?

Quickly threw the bits together to check before welding next week...

Two things to watch out for that I did wrong on my gantry. The smaller gantry end bracket with hole in it. Make sure you get it on the correct side. Also be sure which gantry rail gets the hole for the proxy sensor. I got mine on the wrong rail and my rail holes are not symmetric enough. So I cant switch them. For now I am just living with proxy sensor on the wrong side.

Thanks for the tips DB! The small end with the hole is on the other end of the tube with the big end with cable chain mount. Thinking about the passage of wiring I think that is right. I'll also drill 20mm target holes in both rails just incase :)

I got wise with the holes, I put them on both rails just to prevent that from happening.

edit: just caught your reply, great minds think alike.

I think you got it. I did not mock mine up like you did, so it was not until I mounted the gantry that I realized my error with the bracket.

That was sheer fluke guys, I just went down and checked my mockup and it was right, didn't even think about it when I was putting the gantry together! :)

Oh, and I didn't like the way I drilled all the clamp strips and gantry tubes so I went and bought new steel yesterday to redo them. Gonna steal 1planeguys method of drilling them this time around, I liked that....

Yea, I could have welded up the holes but couldn't be bothered, only cost $62.00 to rebuy everything. I'll use the other tubes and strip for some other project down the line...

That is why I do not gamble. A one in four chance to get them both wrong and I did! :(

Got all my rails cut to length and drilled, along with the new nut plates & tubes for the Y's. I am now waiting on my new welder, my crappy one died. I thought bugger it and am getting a Mig this time round that should last me years. The gantry has been setup again ready for welding and my 2 week goal tracking list has been 50% completed 4 days in. The rest of the goal list is welding so now I have to wait for that to materialise but I should still be on track for this months goal to be accomplished on time.

Getting a MIG is a good decision. It took me some time to finally biting the bullet but once having one welding chore has not been the same ever since.

Quick question before I go buy the 9V AC toroid for my 24V DC E-stop loop. I will be buying a 9+9 1.6a (series) 30VA toroid. Running it in series will give me the required 24V I want. However, I would also like to power my PMDX 122 off the same supply and the question is:

Will I be able to tap one of the 9V legs to give the the 122 supply and still run it in series to supply my 24V E-stop loop?

Bruce,

Take a look at this post.

I built a dual 12 volt and 24 volt power supply using the Antec 0209 Toroid transformer for my MechMate. Works fine. My input voltage was 120 Volts, however.

Excellent, thanks John - just the sort of thing I was looking for. Will collect the toroid this week and get building the supply.

Edit: I see I actually posted in there too, the old mind forgets things unless they are bookmarked. Definitely bookmarking/subscribing to your thread for future reference.

Picked up my new welder today, a quick 200K round trip :) Will be doing some practice with it on the weekend and then will be straight onto all the welding tasks I need to get things rolling.

Sounds like you already have things rolling.
Soon there will be an AHA moment when you look at all the sub assemblies you've completed and think: Man, I'm closer than I thought!!

Thanks Fox, I can already weld with a mig, just never actually owned one. This one is an inverter mig, not a transformer mig so I need to get familiar with its settings. It has arc and tig on it as well, never tig welded in my life so that is for future learning. Gonna give the arc a go though to see how it compares to the crappy one I had :)

Darren, I am definitely looking forward to that AHA moment, it is so close I can feel it. Just sitting there looking at the work I have to do makes me think it is not far off. Then again they could be famous last words!

TIG for steel is fairly easy, TIG for aluminum has a huge learning curve (very heat and timing sensitive)

I got my gantry welded up on the weekend. While I have no "propeller twist" I found I am about 1mm out of square. That seems to put the gantry out of square with the table on the ends meaning one wheel gets there before the opposite one.

Can I just space each opposite wheel differently or will I need to get the gantry as square as possible to the table. I remember Ross (SurfCNC) doing something similar to his machine by fixing one side to the machine and then pulling the other end until it was square.

I am not going to do anything else until I am 100% happy with the way the gantry rides from end to end so any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Bruce if you are only 1mm out of square, rather than risk making it 2 mm out the other direction, you can adjust your y rails square with the x rails, a lot simpler.

Tom, that's a thought.

I think there must be something else I am doing wrong. I measured the 1mm out of square with a framing square on both ends of the inside of the gantry. When I put the wheels on and run the gantry to end of the machine I can measure just under 10mm offset of the ends. I haven't measured each washer I used but put the same number on each bolt and when measured with a vernier the distance from the wheel rim to the gantry plate is within 0.5mm on all of them.

Very confusing and I am not happy with myself at all as I was striving for close tolerances. I may yet be jumping the gun but my initial thoughts are that I have screwed up somewhere along the line.

Keep going, don't be bolted down with some tiny misalignment, no matter how accurate your fabrication works, you still need to dial in with shims here & there at every stage of alignment.

Go back to check your rails leveling & parallelism.

I may have found some of my problem. My last effort of squaring the table was a while ago and since then I have moved the table a meter more into my garage space. After I did that I didn't think to make sure it was square again. Just checked it and the table is 18mm out of square so I am currently squaring it up again and trying the gantry out again!

Machine is now within 1mm of being square, will chuck everything up top and see what the difference is :)

Bruce, if you go ahead and install your first spoil board, it would help keep it square, plus it gives you a temporary work surface. Just start fastening the ends first, straighten the x rails as you work your way to the middle. Its amazing how much flex there is.

Thanks Tom. When it stops raining I will shoot out and grab a sheet or two.

Up and down week this week. Good thing was welding up the Y car, drilling the final 20mm holes in all the rails and getting the Z plate bearing tracks ground/sanded to shape.

Bad things were the X rails not sitting right, had trouble all week getting the gantry to track properly and the welding on the gantry itself. Even though I had my new mig, I had no gas so I stick welded the gantry. After getting some gas and welding up the Y car I now hate the welds on the gantry so they will be ground back and rewelded with the mig.

Also found the main beams had once again canted inwards at the top, my shims had failed throwing everything out hence my problems getting the rails right. Tonight I stripped the table back to legs and main beams and tomorrow will resquare, remeasure and *weld* the main beams to the legs instead of bolting them. The only down side to this is my wasted time building bolt together sides and the 12mm holes that will be left in the bottom of the main beams. May weld them up for cosmetic purposes. Having the main beams unbolted will also give me a chance to properly weld the ends on (didn't want to weld vertical with the stick when I did them) and derust them at the same time in prep for paint.

Once I have everything back to how I want it I will probably paint the whole base, gantry and Y car as all the welding and drilling will be done on those and then I will finish up the end stops, weld those to the rails after which I will paint those too.

Should be done with all the above by weeks end at which time I will take some more pics.

Oh, and what do you guys pay for 32mm MDF? Priced both 2400x1200 and 2400x1800 sheet at $120 and $150 respectively. Oh, could also get a sheet of 1200x1800 25mm MDF for $100. Would there be anything wrong with 2 sheets of 16mm instead as I can get 2 of those for around $60.00.

I would not see a problem if you are gluing it somehow. Remember you want it to be free of metal so not to contact it with a cutter. So screwing it together would be out of the question. I even went to the extent of using brass flathead screws on the off chance I bored into it. I only used 19mm for the spoilboard.

I just bolted down a 19mm (countersunk) and glued a second on top, certainly sures it up

Excellent thanks guys. Will use 18mm instead and stack.

Welding now finished on the main beams, base squared and straightened and the main beams put back on top, main beam tops set to horizontal plus exactly 1650mm apart and everything squared up ready to tack weld tomorrow before fixing in place permanently.

I have to redo the PFC cross bearers, the holes no longer match up due to the canting over of the beam tops. Will turn them over to redrill and the holes that are in there now will be cut off when I angle the ends.

Also started to de-rust the main beams, need to degrease and clean them before the application of Wattle KillRust-Eeter to settle it all down.

Getting there slowly, eating that elephant once again!

...one bite at a time. Sometimes its hard to swallow though.

Yea, these bits were hard to swallow.

Couldn't resist, just went down and tack welded everything, took the clamps off the spreaders I had and bingo! all square on top and exactly the same distance apart. Am almost back to where I was last weekend, only better this time :)

When it gets hard to swallow, bite an even smaller bite :)

As long as it doesn't get too chewy :)

I love it.
Progress, no matter how small is a good feeling.