Well done so far. Looks like a A380 could land there.:p

well done Melissa. You almost there :)

Good job! Almost... Almost... :)

Motors Turning!
 

Moving right along... I've got the essential bits of wiring hooked up, and the motors turn under mach3 control. I still need to do more wiring (for the pushbuttons, e-stop and proxies) but I'm really happy that it works so far!

This will all be much neater when it gets installed into the control box :).

simply beautiful your machine .. thanks for illustrate the tricks
construction .. Gonzalo greetings.


I seem to see in the photos that you have used flexible leveling legs, so I thing this legs will give you unwanted vibrations problems on the machine.

Each foot has a screw thread, with bolts and lockwashers. The foot itself is rubber, but very hard rubber, harder than an automobile tire tread. Its resonant frequency is probably higher than the table's. I bet that the feet are stiffer than the table itself.

Kobus, on final approach a hundred metres directly above this MM you'll find no mere A380s. We snapped this pic ten paces from the front door. (Google Earth Brighton Ontario, head east 10 km, and you'll see why.)

Now that is BEEEG!!

Introducing Brighton International MechMate Airport: :D
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A few more, farther down the runway:
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And taxiing:
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En nog eens De Vliegende Hollander, natuurlijk:
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ok...now that's funny. I needed that levity today!
Cheers.

BIMA you say? Here's one for $88,000.

Looks almost to scale! :)

Heel leuk!

I always wonder how many people of Dutch origin are living around the world? Must be more than the total population of Holland.

Grappig

is inderdaad leuk, ook om wat nederlands te zien

Zeker zie ik hier Nederlanders van allerlei landen... maar niet van Nederland zelf?! Moeten wij ons maar bovenlanders noemen?

Jawel hoor, ook van Nederland. :D

Sascha, hebt je naam "skillalot" iets te doen met piepers jassen?

(Trying to un-hijack this thread from the Dutchmen...) Jan and Sascha are now talking about "piepers jassen" which means peeling potatoes. The 'guy' way to do this is impaling the spud on a quarter inch drill bit and spinning it near a pocketknife. Surely a MM would do a better job on this, or other repetitive culinary tasks?

Nee, niks met piepers schillen hahaha.

Terug on topic dan maar.

Work is progressing on aligning the rails. I built an "alignment car" in the same style as some others here, to make this process easier.

The distance between the V wheels is the same as the bolt spacing. I used a 10-lb lead scuba-diving weight to balance and steady the car. It was still tending to hit the legs of the table, so I added some weight (the step blocks) on top.

The laser is held in place with elastic bands, and is positioned directly over the V to minimize any vertical motion of the laser if the car swings sideways.

The rail off-cuts clamped at the end are for preliminary alignment of the rails, using a fishing line.

Now, what does the laser point at? The door of the workshop, which is 3.5m from the near end of the rails, 9m away from the far end.

I printed off a sheet of custom metric graph paper to act as a backdrop for the laser dot. This was checked against a known-good ruler, to make sure my printer actually printed the dimensions correctly.

The car was positioned at the bolt boundaries (1-2, 2-3, etc) and a photo taken of the graph paper with laser dot, with a handwritten label to identify the car position. Later, I compared the photos on my computer to measure the offsets from one position to the next. These were used to calculate the required shim thicknesses.

Melissa,

Nice explanation of the "alignment car" and the procedure. The pictures help immensely.

So after using the "fishing line" to get your initial alignment, how much variation did you measure using the "alignment car'? I would also be interested in how much variation you measure with the "alignment car" after you shim.

I used the fishing line for lateral adjustment only. I used the car for vertical adjustment.

The weird part is that my baseline measurements show a maximum variance of 0.25mm on the Xa rail. (I'm calling the rail closest to 0,0 "Xa". The other rail I'm calling "Xb").

Now after shimming, I'm calculating a max variance of 0.45mm, but with fewer peaks and valleys. I don't know... maybe my math is off, maybe I'm just going crosseyed from staring at spreadsheets :confused:.

At any rate, the laser dot wiggles around much less when I roll the car down the track now.

I didn't find much on the forums about what tolerances others are shimming the rails to. What's typical? Is 0.45mm (about 20 thou) good enough? I can already picture Gerald rolling his eyes... :).

:eek:

:D

I spent a week and a half chasing .015, in the end I cant tell the difference. Just get it going, the fun stuff just begun ;)

Tim
Still climbing the learning curve

Think about:

The gantry rides on a couple of rollers, so it takes a average/smoothed height

You "surface" the table to follow the rails

The material that you are cutting is mostly thin and bends to follow the table surface

For thick materials, what will you be cutting that needs a perfectly flat surface?

I did not even SHIM my rails...bolted the rail on the C-channel, surfacd the table, surfaced the sacrifice board and happily cutting for a while now without any problem.