Hi, I'm a new poster and have a Tormach 1100 that I'm retrofitting to become a fiber laser cutter. I make titanium rings for a living and was looking for a powerful cutting laser. I found that I wasn't using my Tormach much, as I also have a full size machining center and CNC lathe. The cost of a finished cutting laser was well past the mid 6 digits, so I decided to attempt it myself. I bought the fiber laser engine, and I'll be mounting a large laser head to the Z axis and will be doing a full sheet metal enclosure to block stray infrared.
The main challenge as I see it will be to get the capacitive height sensing circuit in the laser head to work. The Tormach uses steppers, and the height sensor will output a DC voltage corresponding to how far away from a grounded sheet, eg. 1v for 1mm away, 2V for 2mm away, etc. It sounds to me that it might be a simple thing to get that to work with a servo, but not necessarily so with a stepper. My question is would it be easier to have my Z axis convert from stepper that's spec'ed with the machine to servo and use the output of the sensor as the driver for Z? I know nothing about what it would take to do that. Maybe there's another clever way to do it that won't take much reworking or reconfiguring the machine. I am new to the electrical workings of the machines, although I'm pretty good on the g-code end. I can certainly use some insight on the best way to go on that. I can get by with programming Z for flat stuff short term, but I also plan on using it for titanium rings on a rotary axis that change thickness as they go around. Is there an add on product or macro that might accomplish this?
Another smaller issue is that my rings are pretty close to 1" diameter, so it makes sense to always draw my rotary stuff as if it were flat and simply scale my artwork until it's exactly 3.6" tall. Is there a simple way to have the rotary axis simply think it is a Y axis so that it is based on 3.6" and no feedrate calculations are necessary? By scaling the artwork itself to exactly 3.6", it will always perfectly line up, as any diameter calculation errors will show up in a big way when the kerf is only .002". I run a tabletop MicroKinetics machine this way with good results. It doesn't even know it has a rotary axis. I would like to set up my Tormach to do that. It has an A axis, whereas my tabletop mill has no powered Y axis, so in the Tormach case, I would actually need to keep a working Y axis as well as an A axis that would look the same in CAD. The difference would be in the g-code only. The Tormach setup doesn't look to allow me flexibility in setting up axes like this, but maybe someone here will have some insight to that as well.
Another thing I would like to tweak is the rotary axis speed. I replaced the large 6" Tormach rotary axis with a small 3" Sherline rotary. It will have more clearance for the laser head, less friction, and will have no cutting forces on it. Right now it takes over a minute to do a full revolution. Ideally I'd like to speed that up considerably and run it as it were a 3.6" linear axis. I don't see any way to do that from within the Tormach software. The laser itself will be capable of cutting about 40"/minute in that thickness.
Thanks for any input.