95 Hard at work

[Joe195]

Dang 95! Those parts are gorgeous!

[yash101]

Shiny .

That's great that you have a Plasma cutter!
That picture is what I call High Def!
That cut is also what I call High Def! Those are some quality cuts! What are those for? I bet that they are quite light while being structurally rigid!

[CalTran]

Looks like claw parts to me...

My team has access to a Torchmate, but I don't believe we've ever used it for robotics before. It goes through various states of being operational. Man it'd be nice to do cuts on it instead of our techno if we could get cuts like that out!

[JamesCH95]

Thanks for the compliments guys! We really appreciate it. The parts are for a type of mechanism that we like to call a 'carwash'. Very similar to our 2012 robot, they will deploy over the bumper and spin some fabric material to draw a ball over the bumper and into the robot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wyh1ojKQLo

Made some more parts last night, and learned a pretty good lesson after screwing up: cut rates listed 'in the book' don't always translate to real life. It was our first attempt at cutting 0.050in aluminum, book said to cut at 325IPM. That didn't turn out so well, so we cut it again at 100ipm. Both cuts used 45A fine-cut consumables running at 40-45A. These are the results:







This is for the belly-pan of our chassis.

[JamesCH95]

A short video of the plasma cutter in action, to give you an idea of typical cut speed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HHVwJ_C31M

[Kevin Ray]

JamesCH95 We're in the market for a CNC plasma and are new to both. We were looking at PlasmaCam for the table, but your finished products have me sold. Our only concern is that right now no one on the team knows G code for the programming. (1) We're very proficient in solidworks and other CAD programs, will it be difficult to pick up? (2) Is the Torchmate software what you actually designed these pieces in? (3) Could we get a decent set up for about 15K?

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Kevin Ray

JamesCH95 We're in the market for a CNC plasma and are new to both. We were looking at PlasmaCam for the table, but your finished products have me sold. Our only concern is that right now no one on the team knows G code for the programming. (1) We're very proficient in solidworks and other CAD programs, will it be difficult to pick up? (2) Is the Torchmate software what you actually designed these pieces in? (3) Could we get a decent set up for about 15K?

What exactly have we sold you on?

G-Code is pretty easy to pick up as it's an extremely basic language. However, very little work is actually done in straight G-Code. About all I ever do directly in G-Code is change feed-rate commands.

1) Everything in our process is pretty easy and I was able to learn/figure it out in an hour or two. Typically this process is: design part in solidworks, make 1:1 scale drawing of part, export drawing as DXF, in TorchMate CAD turn the DXF into a torchpath with lead-ins and lead-outs, transfer to CNC control computer, convert DXF to G-Code with built-in software, edit feedrate if needed, hit go.

2) We design everything in SolidWorks, Torchmate CAD is there to make toolpaths from those designs, although it is also capable of simple design operations. There are MANY different CAM programs that can perform this function: MasterCAM, ProNest, BobCAD/CAM (what I use for my CNC router), and many others. Talk to whatever vendor you wind up buying from and see what they recommend.

3) That's a loaded question! I would strongly encourage you to talk to Hypertherm and Torchmate and see what they offer for educational institution deals. Torchmate has a number of DIY plasma cutter kits and small-format tables (2'x2', 2'x4', 4'x4') that would probably be quite budget friendly.

A Hypertherm Powermax 85 power supply will run you $3k or more at retail prices, plus consumables and a torch. You will also need to invest in either a water table or a very strong ventilation system to extract fumes from the cutting area. Do not cheap out on fume control, plasma power supply, or cutting torch, these are the most critical parts of a CNC plasma table as far as I can tell.

I'm not an expert CNC plasma table operator. Personally I have only been using them for a few months. Your best bet is to talk to Torchmate and Hypertherm to get setup. I have, however, been using manual plasma torches for a long time. This is where my strong preference for Hypertherm equipment comes from. That, and they're a US company that treats their employees REALLY well, doesn't out-source anything that I know of, and is head-quartered in the next town over from where I live.

[mplanchard]

This work is just beautiful. Well done.

With SolidWorks 2013 you can create dxf output from the Flat Pattern without setting up a drawing.

You can create *.dxf files of sheet metal flat patterns from sheet metal part documents without flattening the model or creating a drawing. This helps to export Dxf files to other applications, such as punch press or laser-cutter programming software.

Use one of these methods:

Click File > Save As and select Dxf (*.dxf) for Save as type.
Right-click Flat Pattern in the FeatureManager design tree and select Export to DXF/DWG.

Marie

[mplanchard]

This work is just beautiful. Well done.

With SolidWorks 2013 you can create dxf output from the Flat Pattern without setting up a drawing.

You can create *.dxf files of sheet metal flat patterns from sheet metal part documents without flattening the model or creating a drawing. This helps to export Dxf files to other applications, such as punch press or laser-cutter programming software.

Use one of these methods:

Click File > Save As and select Dxf (*.dxf) for Save as type.
Right-click Flat Pattern in the FeatureManager design tree and select Export to DXF/DWG.

Marie

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by mplanchard

This work is just beautiful. Well done.

With SolidWorks 2013 you can create dxf output from the Flat Pattern without setting up a drawing.

You can create *.dxf files of sheet metal flat patterns from sheet metal part documents without flattening the model or creating a drawing. This helps to export Dxf files to other applications, such as punch press or laser-cutter programming software.

Use one of these methods:

Click File > Save As and select Dxf (*.dxf) for Save as type.
Right-click Flat Pattern in the FeatureManager design tree and select Export to DXF/DWG.

Marie

Thanks. I used that method to export a DXF last night, it worked very well. Great tip!

[Andy A.]

Our parts making continues! We had a sort of run of the mill (sorry) part to make, and I thought the setup and how we decided to make it was interesting.

Here are the parts, tube plugs being made on our prototrak knee mill:



Those little plugs will end up welded in the ends of some tubes, and center through hole in each will be tapped. for reference, the OD is (I think) .620". We needed 24 total.

Because the OD and surface finish of the plug, and the diameter of the center hole had some fine tolerances these parts were poor candidates for plasma cutting. The plasma cutter is slick but doesn't do fine detail in thick aluminum well. Turning the parts on a lathe is the obvious choice however our lathe was busy at the time and, for a variety of reasons, wasn't a great solution for this part. That leaves the cnc mill!

Entering the program in using the prototrak 'conversational' interface was fairly easy, if a little laborious. The 24 hole array was drilled first and ran short wood screws into the wood backing plate to hold each part in place after it was trepanned out of the plate.

For those curious; the tool is a HSS 3/16 end mill with no special attributes. It ran at 2000 RPM, .1"ish doc, 6ipm with a mist coolant and was pretty happy.

The mill:

[JamesCH95]

Chassis plates done.



Profiled on the CNC plasma cutter, holes and slots drilled and milled on a CNC Prototrak.

Assembly starts tonight!

[Joe195]

You could probably cut out some cool stuff on those chassis plates as well

Just a thought

[s_forbes]

Thanks for posting your manufacturing process, it's always fun to see how different teams get things done! I'm interested to see how the tube plugs (and tubes) are worked into your design.

[BrendanB]

Nice work 95. I can see some similar features between some of our parts. Cough!

Mind if we send some parts to be thrown on the plasma!