Session 1: K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter; Upgrading The Mechanics

K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter Upgrade Series

Welcome to Session 1 of the all new K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter Upgrade Series with Russ Sadler. In this Session, Russ rips out the original flaky X-Y axis frame and completely revamps it by adding some simple inexpensive components. Russ then goes onto the important job of designing and fitting a reliable tube mount and 1st mirror solution.

Release Date: 16th May 2022

Over the last 6 years, Russ has built up a formidable YouTube following for his RDWorks Learning Lab series which currently has over 200 videos.

The original RDWorks Learning Lab series on his “Sarbar Multimedia” YouTube Channel, follows Russ as he tries to make sense of his new Chinese laser machine and to sort out the truths, half truths and outright misleading information that is available on the web.

Six years later with over 4.5 million YouTube Views under his belt, Russ has become the go to resource for everything related to the Chinese CO2 laser machine user or wannabe user.

K40 laser cutter - the x-y frame modifications
K40 Laser Cutter – The X-Y Frame Modifications

In this new series, Russ has condensed his knowledge and experience of the last 6 years to provide valuable information and insights into his total remodelling of the K40 Xtreeem Laser cutter machine. Making it into a powerful, compact laser cutting and engraving solution for those on a budget.

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Session 1: K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics

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Podcast Session 1: K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics

Video Resource Files for K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics

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The k40 xtreeem upgrade video series
The K40 Xtreeem Upgrade Video Series

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Transcript for K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics

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The K40 Xtreeem Laser Cutter Upgrade series with Russ Sadler.

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Session one: Upgrading the mechanics. Surprise.

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It’s me again. I’m just about to start a brand new venture.

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Now, look. Most of you guys will recognize what I’ve got here.

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It’s been sitting around in my workshop for about eighteen months now doing exactly this.

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It’s been very nice, as a coffee mug stand, but I I’ve got no interest in doing anything with this K40 machine.

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Now, that’s not meant to be disparaging in any way to the many,

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many owners of K40 machines out there. I have seen some fantastic work come off of these machines.

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And it’s a great little starter machine. But it’s also a machine that people love to take on board,

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and then do, I’m going to say silly things with it, like spend hundreds or thousands

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of pounds on it when they can get a machine like this for the same amount of money.

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But of course, they wouldn’t get the same enjoyment because most of the pleasure in spending

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money on these machines is, if you like, getting the pleasure of engineering.

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The cost is not important. It’s the challenge, that’s the important thing.

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And CloudRay in their wisdom, have recognized this,

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and they gave me this machine a couple of years ago or 18 months ago and said, Look, it’s sitting on our shelf.

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It was a return. Do you want it? Can you do something with it?

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Do I want it? Can I do something with it? It’s free.

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Well, as I said, this is what it’s been used for for the last 18 months.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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A very convenient flat surface on which to place things. Just recently.

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Embarrassingly, CloudRay said to me. Have you managed to think about that K40 machine?

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There’s a lot of business out there supplying spares to people that want to upgrade them.

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And obviously now, they want to tap into that market. And they’ve asked me, can I look at upgrading this machine?

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The simple answer was no. Mechanically, it isn’t really worth the effort of upgrading. For what they are,

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they do a fantastic job, but they then also provide, as I said, a great engineering opportunity for people to pimp them up.

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I don’t want to pimp this machine up. I want to turn it into something that is just basic, useful, that performs a function.

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I would like it to be a micro version of these machines, so I’m using the knowledge and skills that I’ve used on these machines,

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and I’m going to try and apply some of them to this machine. Now, I’m not going to attempt to spend thousands of pounds on this machine.

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First of all, I want to upgrade the mechanics of the machine because they are, if I use the word basic that just about sums it up.

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That’s not being rude, it’s adequate to do the job. It’s basically a, an inkjet printer mechanism that’s been converted to take a scanning head.

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I want to take it beyond adequate and I want to push this machine into areas where maybe it’s not been before.

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But I want to do it at a pretty budget price. You can do it with very basic workshop equipment and buying some spare kit from CloudRay. Now,

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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for all I know,

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CloudRay may decide to take the basic mechanical kit because it is a piece of simple kit that should just almost bolt into this machine and sell that,

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as well as all the extra pieces that I’m going to show to you on this machine.

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I’m not going to use the existing controller. I want to use a proper digital controller with a power supply and proper stepper motor drives.

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I know what’s in here at the moment works. But I want to do it,

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“big machine style”, but not at “big Machine” costs. So I hope you’ll join me for this adventure.

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I’m not going to take you into every single detail of what I’m doing. I’ve got no idea how long it’s going to take, how many sessions,

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but I suspect it’s probably in the region of five or six sessions to what I would call remodel this machine.

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I’m going to strip it out and I’m going to put something back in, which is more up to date than this.

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What can I say? This old school analogue control system that’s in here?

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Now, I’ve already made a start on ripping this thing apart. I’ve taken the head off.

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I’ve taken the four wheel head bearing system off,

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and I’ve also removed the screws that hold these two face frames in. If I need

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to get access to this complete system so that I can work on it mechanically.

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So these two frames are completely loose now, but it’s not physically possible to jiggle this out of here.

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And the only way we can get this off is basically to remove this mirror, just a couple of screws.

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Fix this mirror bracket onto the stepper motor.

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And now that we’ve got that off, there is sufficient wriggle room to get this frame out, but hang on, it doesn’t come out because….

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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We’ve got some wires attached. So what we have to do now is to go into this electrical enclosure.

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And we have to remove these cables from this circuit board and voila, here is it! It’s all ready to work on.

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As you can see, at some stage somebody has frozen that mirror up with some hot glue so that it doesn’t adjust.

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Sounds like a bad idea to me. You’ve got adjusting screws on here. Why have you made it solid?

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That’s something we shall deal with in the future. We certainly shan’t be using that mirror.

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Right, well, we don’t need any of this at the moment. So we’ll just re-site that so that we’ve got a nice work area here.

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Let me explain what my thinking is.

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I don’t want to spend a fortune on re engineering this to the Nth degree. I want it nicely engineered so that it does the job.

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First of all, we’ve got this rather dodgy head system on here with its four wheels that runs in this [channel].

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It’s functional, but not exactly Accurate.

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You can’t run this thing really fast.

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And I’m hoping that even with these little dinky stepper motors, I might be able to get it to run fast. And if I can’t get it to run fast enough,

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I will see if I can get some slightly more powerful stepper motors to perform this function.

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Now, the very cheap construction of this is in fact a benefit as far as I’m concerned,

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because it makes it so much easier for me to take out parts and replace them.

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I mean, this gantry system is very simple to remove just two screws each end and there it is, hey, we don’t need that anymore.

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I’ve got some pieces already premade that I,

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I hate to use the word designed, because you can see look, it’s a piece of bent 3mm aluminium.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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Well, I suppose I had to design it didn’t I to make it like that,

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but that’s the sort of thing that you can go down to your local hardware store and buy a piece of 3mm aluminium flat bar.

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This happens to be something that I had up in the roof of my workshop and I pulled it down.

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This is 38 mm, inch and a half. But you can get away with one inch

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material. Strength is not important, because although this is bendy, it doesn’t matter because we’re going to make that stiff by doing this.

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So I’ve previously tapped some M3 holes in this bar.

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Now, although I bent this up in my little fly press on a v bender.

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This is the sort of thing that you could bend in your vice. It doesn’t have to be super accurate.

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OK, so now we have a really nice, super smooth, non flexible x axis.

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I haven’t designed and made all the pieces for this so far,

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but I’ve just given it a bit of a flying start so that you can see very quickly where we’re going to with this project.

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Okay. So again, I put tapped holes in the end here so that I can just screw this piece of aluminium straight onto that bracket.

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Now this bracket has got big holes in here.

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They’re 5mm holes, but I’ve used four millimetre screws, purposely so that the whole bracket can wobble like that.

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Eventually, you’re going to have to set this bracket true and square to this frame.

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But at the moment, I’m not worried. We just leave it loose ish.

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Now at this end here, look, we’ve got the drive belt that connects up. This stepper motor here is the Y stepper motor.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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There’s a very thin shaft and it is a very thin shaft which might need to be increased at some point in the future.

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But at the moment, we’ll see whether we get torque wind up on that when we start running it. That shaft connects to here.

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So you drive both ends of the gantry at the same time, so everything stays true and parallel.

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It doesn’t trend or want to crab. So we just take this support bearing off of here for the y axis.

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All this wheel was doing was just literally running backwards and forwards like this to support the end of the gantry.

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It wasn’t in any way contained. It was, it was free to lift up and down.

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The only thing that was containing it was this nut here, because if you set it tight enough like that.

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It stops it wobbling. Again, we’ve got two tapped holes in the end here, same as the other end.

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And all we need to do is just bolt that on there like that.

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OK, now I’m not going to do this up tight because we’re nowhere near finished yet, as you’ll see in a minute.

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But that’s the essence of how the X gantry fits on now.

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So. We got a problem here, which we’ve got to solve, and we solve that problem very simply in this way.

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We’ve got a 300 millimetre as opposed to a 400 millimetre linear bearing.

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Now, if you take a look, you’ll see that this linear bearing is different to that one.

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This is the long version, and this is the short version. We don’t need a long version for doing what I’m going to do now, which is to pop that,

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under there. So now. We’ve got a nice support.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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And control of our gantry. OK.

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It’s a little bit floppy at the moment. That’s because you haven’t seen the next very simple part that I’ve designed, which is.

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This very thin, stainless steel bracket. Now it is thin, and it’s made of 0.7 stainless steel because I want it to be flexible.

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I don’t want it to be stiff. These holes in here are designed for M3 screws.

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I’ve got a 3.5 drill that just happens to go nicely and neatly through that hole.

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Now there’s plenty of room under there for me to put a little clamp, like that.

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Now what I’ve got to do is make sure that I set that up against,

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the edge, of this rail. And I will do the same at the back here as well. I will line that up with the edge of that rail.

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Hopefully. And I say, hopefully. They’ve made these sufficiently accurate that,

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this rail will run parallel with this linear bearing that’s over here.

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That’s the reason why, I’ve got this rather floppy mounting here. There will be sufficient clearance in here for

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the bearing to be able to just flex very slightly and take up any slight non parallelism between these two.

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That means I haven’t got to set this up super accurately.

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This bearing is not doing anything other than supporting the end here and making it run smooth. And all

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we’re going to do with this, we’re going to fix this down with just two screws. One at this end.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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I’ll just make sure I’ve got a full diameter in there. So there we go,

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we’ve got two nice perfect marks here for me to drill through.

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We’re going to drill through two point five and put an M3 tapped hole in there. So I’m just going to take that to my pillar drill and drill and tap those holes.

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Now, as I said to you, I’m trying to make this simple so that you don’t need any sophisticated equipment to do this modification.

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I drilled and tapped the holes for these screws.

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There is nothing to stop

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you putting straightforward drilled holes right the way through and putting nuts on the back. That will perform the task just as easily.

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And there’s nothing at the back here that gets in the way of having nuts there, In a similar way,

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although I am going to put tapped holes here and here. What I will warn you is, that when you try and put these drilled holes in,

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there are all sorts of ribs on the underneath of this extrusion here, which you might be able to see in the bottom here.

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You can see these grooves that’s going to make your drill go all sorts of funny ways.

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So just be very careful when you do your drilling or you break your drill, so do it very gently.

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The same will apply when you come to do your tapping, I’m not going to machine tap this because there is a risk that I might break the tap,

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whereas if I do these manually, I should be able to feel what’s going on.

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Now this is a machine tap. It’s something called a spiral point tap.

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So if you’re going to try and do tapping, I always suggest you use a machine

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tap, a spiral point, tap. They cost a little bit more, but you only need one of them.

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You don’t need a full set of three as per the old style. So provided you

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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keep this upright and you can see I’m using an old drill chuck. Which is a perfect way in which you can get a nice, well, aligned tapped hole.

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It doesn’t need to be too deep because the screws are only around about 10 millimetres long.

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Now these holes are designed for cap head screws. So if you’ve got some M3 cap head screws, that’ll do the job just fine.

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I am going to be using countersink screws that will centre

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these up slightly better. Because the heads fit perfectly in these holes and there we go.

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We don’t need any more than two screws in there because this is a very short length.

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It’s a very, very stiff piece of stainless steel. It’s not going to go anywhere.

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There’s absolutely zero flex on there.

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We’ll undo this screw, we’ll just get the bearing out the way for the minute, we don’t need that anyway now. Between these two plates,

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we will sandwich my thin steel plate. And there we go.

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So we’ve got that in there. Now again, we can just snug that up, but we don’t need that.

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We just leave it loose at the moment because we, we need this whole thing to be

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a little bit flexible because we’re going to pop our bearing underneath there.

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The screws that are required to go into this bearing are very short. M3 x 4 is what I shall be using.

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Don’t tighten these screws up yet, just get them engaged.

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Now you may ask the question, how do I make my holes so accurate? Well the answer is very simple.

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I always use my laser machine to drill the holes, cut the holes in a block of Perspex to start with.

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Now this is not the jig that I used, but this is a drill jig that I’ve made out of a piece of 8mm,

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but I often make them out of four or five millimetre thick Perspex, clamp them onto the surface in the right place and then drill through.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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So I get my holes perfect, because the holes are cut to the right centres perfectly on the laser machine.

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Now we haven’t tightened this up at the moment, but already look at that… silky smooth.

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When you saw that steel bracket that I had there, it had slots in it.

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Well, that’s the reason for the slots, so that I can adjust this gantry up and down so that this end is the same distance away.

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And I don’t know what is at the moment, but we’ll find something that actually fits in there.

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One of the small issues you’re going to have is this, you’re either going to have the bridge

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over the outside here because we’ve got this rail in the way or in this case,

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because I happen to have a 400 rail, which I’ve shortened. I can do that.

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So I’ve already got the same packing piece, this side that I’ve got this side.

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So I’m going to basically measure from on top of this rail to on top of this rail.

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So I’ve tucked those pieces of metal under there.

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And because this is sitting on a flat surface, I think it’s reasonable to assume that this and this are pretty parallel to each other.

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So if I use my workbench as a flat reference surface and then just check the squareness and make sure that that is sitting upright.

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Now I can tighten these screws up. Okay, so now I can adjust that down on to the pile of shims that I’ve got there.

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I now know that my gantry is running true to the base.

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So without any major modification, except ripping the gantry off and using exactly the same items that are already there,

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we’ve already done a major conversion to this machine in two simple stages. Two screws here and four screws just here.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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Now, these could both be part of a kit.

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But if they’re not, as you can see, it’s not exactly rocket science to do this, I can provide you with drawings for this bracket.

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You can go out and buy these from eBay. And here we are.

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We’ve already got ourselves a fundamental x y motion with proper bearings on it now.

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Now, trust me, this is not the right way that this is going to fix on,

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but this is just a temporary fix just to demonstrate to you what we’re trying to achieve.

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There’s the new head and I’ll just go on to my other machine and nick

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the C-series lens tube and the clamp system that goes with this head, and there we go.

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That’s how the head fits on now.

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So there’s your, there’s your nozzle and lens tube, which will take a four inch lens, a two inch lens, a two and a half inch lens,

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and a one and a half inch or compound engraving lens. So you can have everything that you want on there.

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And. Now, this head is going to go higher than this, it’s not, it’s not going to be here, it’s going to go up at least another inch.

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So lets put that frame in which is basically your machine, and now as you can see, we can get right down to the base of your machine.

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Or we can come right up to here. I’ve got a specific application that I want this machine for.

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I don’t need a super depth. Now if for any reason

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you want more depth for cutting. Then you always have the opportunity to cut the bottom out of this frame and stand the frame up on taller legs.

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I don’t need to. I’m going to be very happy that I can reach the whole of the working depth inside this machine with my adjustable nozzle.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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Today, we’re going to start off by

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mounting this lightweight head onto this carriage. To do this, I’ve manufactured some little bits of acrylic.

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Now these are 3mm thick acrylic. Now I’m waiting for an air fitting to go in here, but it doesn’t stop me assembling it.

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I can always take it apart again because the whole thing, although it’s three pieces, it literally just plugs together.

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So what we’ve got here is a little location tenon. And these two pieces plug together.

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And we can drop the tenon in there, and the idea of that tenon going in the back is that it sticks out the front and allows us to move the head

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up and down in a linear controlled manner. So we don’t get any twist on the head when we adjust it.

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Anybody that’s used to a K40 will know that the head is totally unadjustable.

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And it may well be that it’s a real nightmare to set the machine up.

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This is not. This will be a dead simple job to set the beam up on this machine and be able to set it up accurately.

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The first thing we’re going to do is to plug this onto here.

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Screw that straight onto there. But before we do that, I don’t put tapped holes in this material because it’s not strong enough.

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So what I do, I put nuts on the back like that, and then we’re going to screw this onto here and captivate those nuts.

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So we’re screwing this bracket straight onto the bearing so that we get the least amount of twist,

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wobble, flex. It is as stiffly mounted as we can possibly get it.

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Now there are two more of these nuts to go on the top here that are used to clamp the head.

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We’ve only got a limited thickness here, two millimetres plus three and three, so that’s 8mm.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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And we’ll just put an M4 washer on there as well. So we’ll just loosen those screws off, with this guide tongue in here.

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The whole head can be adjusted up and down by a total of 12 millimetres, so we’ll set that into the central position and we’ll just lock that up.

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So there’s an additional screw in the bottom here that locks the head up. And this is now completely, completely solid in all directions.

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There’s the head mounted now. Next, we’ve got to look at how we’re going to mount the mirror on here and what sort

209
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of mirror we’re going to use, because we’re not going to use the old mirror. I’ve got here a short head that I originally designed for this machine.

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OK, but it’s, I thought it would make more sense to use the long head so that we’ve got

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a maximum amount of adjustment without having to have a fully adjustable table.

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We can use the lens tube, a long lens tube, to achieve the same result,

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much easier and cheaper. Because this is a nice, lightweight head with a 25mm mirror that goes in there.

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I’m going to use this as the basis of a mirror assembly that adjusts in this y axis, and I’m going to use this edge here,

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as my reference edge. So that I can move it backwards and forwards in a straight line instead of using this slot.

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We don’t need all this clamping system on here, so I’m going to be a bit brutal with a hacksaw and

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we’re just going to cut this off. Now that I’ve got the head on. I’ve got a lot of space here that’s wasted space.

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And I’m going to run out of rail here, but if I go to the other end.

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I can’t use the space at this end because I shall hit the bearing – here.

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So what I plan to do, it’s worthwhile, physically just moving this rail along one pitch.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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I’ll take these screws out and move them along one. If we take that pin out

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there. I’m slightly worried that we shall fall off of the end of the rail.

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Let me just have a look. No, we’re not, we’re perfect.

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We mustn’t run off the end of the rail, otherwise we shall lose the ball bearings inside there.

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But there’s a natural stop there now, which prevents that coming off the end of the rail and a natural stop there.

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So we should be able to set zero and make sure we maximize the table size.

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Now, this at the moment is obviously the wrong place for the limit switch.

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Okay, so we’re going to have to re-site that limit switch and the sensible thing is probably to put it up here somewhere, I would think.

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Well, I think that’ll be a nice, convenient place to mount it. But it’s got to go the other way up.

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So I need to create a little bit more slack, and that looks like it’s an M2 screw.

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Make sure those bearings are clean. There we go, that’s perfect.

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OK, so now, we’re going to put the belt back.

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And this was the tricky bit that I had to think about quite a lot. These screws here.

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There are nuts, captive nuts in the back there in hexagon slots.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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The same as I did behind here. Now I would advise you to put this assembly together before you mount

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this lot up. Because it’s a little bit tricky to get the nuts up behind here with it all assembled.

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It’s possible. I’ve just done it, but it’s tricky. We’ve got M3 screws and we’ve got some oversize M3 washers.

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That’s a normal size M3 washer. And this is an oversize, I think they call it a C washer.

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It’s the next size up. Okay.

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It’s got a bigger outer diameter that fits on an M3 screw, and that’s what I’ve used. Because the nuts are captive at the back there.

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You should be able to just tighten this up from the front. So hold the belt nice and flat and level as you tighten it up and tighten the screws up.

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Little by little. And we should get the belt coming out nice and straight like that.

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Just give them a final pinch and that belt is never going to come off there.

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OK, so we thread the belt around this idler pully at the end here.

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Make sure you’ve got the screws almost as loose as possible, so they’re only just hanging into that bracket.

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Now what we’re going to try and do now is get this belt tucked behind those two washers.

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So I’ve got a lot of excess belt because this is a different mechanism for fixing the belt.

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So we’re trying to get the belt as evenly as possible underneath those two washers.

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And then tighten up. Again, we don’t want the belt to go flying off any sort of angle, we’d like it to come out straight.

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Now we come back to this end here, which is where we’ve got our idler pully. And on the outside, we’ve got two screws, which allows us to tension that pulley up.

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So we’ll put those two screws, screw them in evenly. And there we go.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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That’s a nice amount of tension on that belt. And we can leave the spare piece of belt there because it doesn’t matter.

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And here’s the number 2 mirror that

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I said I was going to modify. Cut the end off and it’s just a mirror, a 25mm mirror holder. This material that we used for this back rail,

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which happens to be 38mm by 3mm aluminum. Look, I’ve used it again to make a bracket, a very simple bracket,

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which has just got the corner notched away so that it sits over the belt and it’s

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got two holes in it so that we can use the same two screws to fix this bracket on.

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And then in there, we’ve got just one tapped hole, that’s all we need to hold this into place very neatly.

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We’ve got our mirror there that slides backwards and forwards, so you keep that nicely referenced against this surface here.

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Change the position of your beam as it hits mirror three. And then just lock it up.

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We’ve done the x axis switch, so that the x axis will zero just there.

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We haven’t done the y axis switch. Now the y axis switch is hidden over the back here, and I don’t think that’s changed at all.

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Let’s just have a look. No, switch, it just perfectly sits on the end of that wide rail there, click click.

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So if that’s zero, we’ve got about 240mm of travel that we can use. Well, there’s our zero.

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And we’ve got something like about 340, so we’ve gained 40mm each way. With those few simple modifications,

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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we’ve completely transformed this machine and it’s ready to go back into its box now.

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So I’m just going to remove these pieces here, and we’re going to pop this back into that box.

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What you see here is the conventional way that they mount tubes. Most clamps are adjustable on decent machines,on these cheap machines,

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they fix them, but there is no way to adjust the clamps when you want to set the beam.

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So that’s why I’m tackling this problem a completely different way. I am still going to have a fixed clamp system like this.

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But it’s going to be like a clamped system that you’ve never seen before.

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We’ll just remove these clamps because we are not going to need these anymore. Well, to get access to those, I’m going to have to take this out.

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We’ve taken the old tube holder out with all its packing pieces in it.

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We don’t need those anymore. They can go in the bin. Mirror is pretty small.

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Put everything in a box. Now my tube holder comprises of a very simple piece of

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channel, that happens to be 38mm inside and 25mm outside with a 3mm wall thickness.

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And basically, all I’m going to do is to drop the tube,

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on there like that. There’s my mirror holder at the end here and the Mirror will be fixed in relation to the laser tube. So there’ll be no adjustment.

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How am I going to hold the tube on? Well, the tube is held on very simply with these over centre clamps.

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I put them into these slots like this, drop my tube on.

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And just go Click. Click.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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And there it is, completely solidly locked on there. Now, the idea will be that I should move the tube and the mirror backwards and forwards together.

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I’ve got a plate and that plate will sit in the bottom against the back face of the enclosure

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so that it can always be moved backwards and forwards in a controlled straight line.

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It’s only going to move backwards and forwards a few millimetres. All right, but that’s the plan now we’re going to bolt this onto here.

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This is the high voltage input terminal.

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And if you remember how this was connected, it was connected with nothing more than a crocodile clip and an exposed terminal,

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which is pretty close to this metal surface here.

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Bad news. So we shall be changing that when we come to actually physically reconnecting this together.

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So what we shall do is lose that crocodile clip inside its protective case.

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And we shall put a little hole through the side here.

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So that the pin can go through the side there, and then I’ll fill up the end here with high voltage silicone sealant,

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so there’s no chance of this arcing across to this place. In the end here

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we’ve got a piece of foam that has been put in there with some double sided tape.

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Now I don’t know why that in there, because that’s not the place where it’s going to arc out, it’s going to arc here, not there.

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So I’m a bit puzzled as to why that’s there, but we’re taking it out anyway so that when we put our tube in, yeah, that’s all going to work.

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These pipes are very um, what can I say?Flimsy.

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They have got a tendency to kink very easily.

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So we may well be doing something with those, just to make sure there’s not a problem with electricity at the back there.

Transcript for K40 Laser Cutter – Upgrading The Mechanics (Cont…)

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I shall be putting in a plastic backplate like that, so there’s no chance that we’re going to get any arcing across to that case.

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So I’m going to be screwing a plate on the back there, a plastic plate on the back there.

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So that’s all looking pretty neat at the moment, and we shall do the same on this end, we’ll push the crocodile clip right back into its housing.

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So we’ll just unclamp the tube like that? Rotate the tube temporarily to get our fitting on.

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There we go. We’ve got a connection onto there. When we’re ready, we can just fill that up, and it will just sit neatly over the back there.

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So that basically is all the mechanical structural work that we’re going to be doing on the machine.

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So I think in probably the next session, we’re going to start on the electrical modifications.

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So we’re going to rip out the existing system and replace it with a proper digital control system.

K40 laser upgrades - finishing the build and setup
K40 Laser Upgrades – Finishing The Build and Setup

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Last updated August 26, 2021

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