hello guys;

I'm about to finish my first plasma cutting machine, the axes move in all directions a person it  was advised that it was not necessary to limit switches but I find it hard to understand how you will reference the machine without these I was told that by setting homing / limits but took a week and I can not, do someone can help me


 

In all honesty you do not need to HOME the machine. Just move it to your WORK 0,0 and zero the DROs and press the big green Button(Cycle Start).

Now IF you are running servos then YES you need limit switches to protect the servo.  With steppers NOPE not needed.

(;-) TP

 tanks my friend,,

I have in my machine stepers, Then every time I turn on my machine I need to manually reference the home?

   What TP is saying is "referencing" isnt necessary. And if only running the part in 1 set up or if no mistakes are made, that is probably alright. However if there was an issue or recovery was needed, I am not sure how he would implement that. Not saying it cant be done, I just dont know how,       yet.

   The way I did it prior to having switches on my machines was to move the X & Y axis to their most negative travel and the Z up to the top. Hit ref all home. All machine coordinates will then turn to 0. If your software limits are correct (if you set them up), you can keep your machine pretty accurate, not to the .002 but good for most work.

Plasma is EASY to recover as the cut tolerances are fairly large. Move to a point in the program you want to restart in. MOVE the machine torch tip to THAT spot on the material you have already started cutting on. Set the DROs to the same as in the Program line and restart.

There are several OTHER methods as well.

(;-) TP