Better Chinese Co2 Laser Cutter Crosshair.

The problem.

the 50watt Co2 laser cutter is a great machine but does need modifications to make it great. the aiming led diode is as more of a line than a dot and with no focus its not adjustable. I was one of the laser Facebook groups. were a saw a post on modifying laser pointer to form a crosshair. so I asked for a copy of the designs. and started on this journey.

So I have removed the current diode that interestingly was not soldered. so I will be swapping leases I have added a jst female connector to the led wiring. I will also be adding a switch so can turn it on and off. I have soldered the male end to the lasers.

the 2 designs i tried first of all

theses will be placed at 90 degrees to the tube in an acrylic holder then aligned under the nozzle. the reason for the jst connector is I can then swap it over to each tube lens.

wanted line lasers damit.

tested last night and figured out they had sent the wrong pointers so crosshairs. (note to self, test things before soldering them) not worried will use for some other projects i have in my list of things to make or design.

I decided to hedge my bets and try 2 laser cut designs first one did not work with the line lasers fingers crossed on the second one. have changed the measurements slightly on the design to make it a tighter fit will test fit this design later don’t line up might be thickness I going to do some more testing and do one more design as well to see if I can get it lined up.

Argh another bust time to look for 3d printed files.

As you can see it’s nowhere near dead center

right thingiverse design attempt number 3 and away it goes.

going down the 3d printed route as well.

Another non-working idea as designed for smaller led diode modules. so that again was for smaller diode laser dot it replicated standard hardware. after had metal and printed version, I inverted the 2 diode holders and lightbulb moment.

where i got my idea black is original hardware violet is a design for 6mm diode

So i made a sketch of the part and then modified it using some 3d modeling.

Right now to test it. out and see if it all fits will publish the files if so. wish me luck. little loose but concept works have changed the inner dimensions from 13mm to 12mm reprinted it now to test fit and tighten it all down if it works might re design the center as well.

perfect now to make it square.

I have published the remix here you will also need 2 x of the centre the tube mounting off this design by billkaroly from Thingiverse available here. You will also need some 3mm bolts and nuts.

Next modification will be moving and permanently mounting mA meter temp gauge upgrade. adding some button for lighting, laser marker and ultimate air assist on / off.

Still waiting on parts for nest project

Hi every one just about to get my mods underway on the 50watt laser

I ordered a lens kit and its some were between USA and UK

have the ultmate air assist ready to install.

just need to pick up a 50L silent compressor some fitments and should be ready for next project.

the good news is I am cancer-free and I am also covid and lung infection-free to just resting up before I get on fully with projects, I am also waiting on dell to rebuild my laptop.

yes i know was a ruff month for me but back time to make stuff and be merry.

looking for a good deal on a compressor and also looking for a dust extractor as well for the cnc machine.

back soon.

Lens orientation on the 50w

Being on Facebook I was helping someone and was told my lens should be the other way up now I have tested this but still not 100% sure I am right.

the principle cuve should be up on laser well mine is down.

so I modified some ones cut test file and ran it in both orations

modified file.

The result I know I shouldn’t be down the cave and suffered afterwards but as you can see the orientation cut better with lens down power was set at 70% which is my laser max point. I then used the power scale function on light burn to run thought different power percentage. however i am yet to see if focal point has moved due to the lens being rotated. that will be my next test but need to get better.

not sure as looks like focal point has moved i might do a ramp test.

so next I am going to design or borrow a ramp test to see if the focal point has moved. with the lens being reversed as this intriguing me. as anyone who knows me knows my mind is always active.

Update 1

I have ordered a lens kit so now 38.1mm 50.8mm and 63.5 lenses with alignment tool from American Photonics should be he in the next week or so will do some testing with that when it comes. will review it properly so far am impressed with customer services it’s on the route from the USA to our small island. see how much import tax I have to pay.

update 2

currently designing a ramp test as want something i can do in 1 pass and replace the ramp after

my little quickly put together design v1

to be continued.

Sorry, no updates I ended up in the hospital.

Has been a tough month for me i was working in the cave doing the Christmas gifts for friends and family when i developed bad back pain, I thought I pulled something,

Called the 111 non emergency number ended up in an ambience trip to the hospital.

They discovered I had a very bad chest infection. During my stay, I contracted Covid-19 that has I am now covid-19 free but awaiting another operation.

So I will resume doing stuff soon and the rebrand but banned from the mancave doctors orders for 2 to 3 weeks.

going to recover and make 2021 a busier and better year.

all the best

josh.

I am alive

sorry for the lack of posts i have been woking on getting some bits done but day jobs

taken president again will hopeful doing some new bits soon. as work sleep repeat is what it’s feeling like ATM but will hopefully get back to my daily blogs soon.

still got printers to fix testing out new air assist for the 50w over the next few days.

will post more soon.

Back in london

Right back in London after a extended working away and a bit of well earned rest.

time to get my printers all calibrated as got some jobs.

i am thinking about rebranding the site still great content but might add more videos and start reviewing stuff and more.

still just an idea but will be fun as always.

going to do some cnc carving with some pine planks i brought before leaving for wales.

first print some head phone holders for the my creative space.

this morning was greeted with spaghetti junction flipped the sheet and printed again came out perfectly

Now printing puzzle box to make sure its fully calibrated.

Missing my Cave

original design done 3 ways

As we are working remotly from our holiday rental property i have been teaching my self a new skill as you know me i love to learn stuff and the lack of other tools here.

So went in 50/50 with the wife on an embroidery machine. so been learning how to do designs for it as a new skill to learn. its a completely different way of doing stuff but a fun learning curve.

One day might relocate the cave to wales at some point in the future as would have the space for more equipment and do more projects.

will be back with new projects in September.

Yes i am alive

Sorry for not posting for a while been in wales for a few weeks going to be staying down longer as got things that i have to fix in the house and other bit. dont i will be back in 3 weeks for more fun with cnc 3d printing and laser cutting also now teaching my self embroidery so will be doing some fun things with that.

i am going to be with my arcade machine i am going to start stripping it back for the mane conversion project i have in mind. so will be posting some updates.

back to the cave in 3 weeks time ish.

Building an Unraid server on a budget.

had an old HP Proliant 350ML G6 kicking around the office we have upgraded to a new server its got a 1.2 tb raid installed and had 5 x spare pair SATA ports. As we are still in lockdown i decided to make the ultimate server on a budget.

you can pick this server up fro around £150 on eBay complete. it was running 16gb of ram and 2.15 GHz processor with 4 core processor. and had a spare port for the second CPU.

I had to buy a second hand mother board due to me damaging second CPU socket and killing the monther board £30 for one shipped with 24gb of memory with it.

I also removed DVD drive to give me 1 extra SATA port for a SSD

on eBay, i picked up 2 x matched CPU 2.56 and 9 rams 4gb DIMMs for around £65 i picked up a GTX 1050 GPU and sound card for around £160 salvaged a 4 port USB card. i was going to use some old 2tb drives out of a raid server but when i the disk performed health check was getting some errors so decided as this project is sponsored by my company would invest in some NAS 4tb drives £104 each so got 5 one will act as a parity drive. also using a 500gb SSD for cache drive files. oh and extra fan for missing CPU slot and fan baffle for £36

i have also added ordered 2 matched six core cpu 3.05 Ghz maxing out the board for £40 will upgrade them when they arrive as coming from asia.

So all in if had brought it from the net i would be in under £1000. 16tb server with 60gb of ram 4 Gb GPU.

the hardware went together very easily i started off by fitting memory to the second processor DIMM slots. i then fitted changed out the first CPU and added the second one. do love big towers only got 2 cuts from heat sink and frame.

All came today and all installed looking nice and full inside the case build is all done. just fits thankfully a little tight in areas. but looking good.

now to turn on V-rt so i can use pass through tech and turn on some other features.

Setting up Unraid got 32gb USB flash drive download installer and flash drive plug it into a USB slot. In my case, the motherboard had an internal USB slot then on boot get into the bios and change boot order i did USB, CD and HD. the system will then boot USB first.

first boot takes a few mins you are greeted with the login screen. the user name is root password is blank.

you are then greeted with a register for trial or buy screen click trial.

would recommend adding community app plugin there are lots of guides on this but basically you to unraid web site and look in the footer for apps store and look for plugin url then go to add the plugin and then past it there a few seconds later all installed.

next up you going to need to build an array in my case its 5 drives, 4 for data and one parity drive for back up just in case one drive fails .

next up is adding services and some virtual machines going to be running Windows 10 and Ubuntu desktop 20.4.

First you will need to enable the array and set dockers going. would recommend looking on you tube space invader one seems to have some good tutorials.

I am currently clearing down 2 TB drive so i can make a back up of business array then will have an off-site backup as well as the current live version. this will live sync every day.

so far i am impressed with the unraid system couple of glitches but stable.

Starting to get things working.

Will update this project as i add to it. have set an octofarm server going and its also managing all the house entertainment. looking at other addons as well. have set up OpenVPN so i can tunnel into the server work from it remotely have 3 virtual machines running. processor seam so working ok till i get the extra 4 cores going 12 cores 24 threads but that’s a few weeks off.

going to be out of London for a week hoping to get one more project done before i leave as have also been running it back to back with wast board. but might break it into two parts as 3d printing side done but now going to work on making some aluminium clamps with fusion 360 and CNC machine. this is a new idea so as going to be in deepest darkest wales will use spare time to teach myself manufacturing.

Will post the 3D brackets project tomorrow or Saturday.

CNC New Waste Board

New day new project after having a few failures due to double-sided carpet tape failing to hold bits down I have decided to modify my sacrificial board. saw someone do this on a youtube video so i have decided to make my own.

The Idea

Now as the board is bigger than max dims of the milling machine I am going to have to take some true measurements of limits of the machine. As the size of my sheet in the program.

I have these hammer in M5 t-nuts about 100 of them that brought a while back for this project. But then realized that the bed was smaller and my original plan would not work.

So I know the board size is 300 x 400 well according to the manufacture.  the wasteboard is actually sized as 380 x 550. Now to home the machine then figured out limits. In mach3 start off by homing all then zeroed X & Y. I then moved y and x to there limits and noted down the size in my case this was 227.6 x 387 so this is the material size. There is an extra 20 mm in x and y if I wanted as soft limits stop 10mm from each axis but happy with that as gives me room. Now on to the design side.

The design

This is double-sided job and my first attempt at one. So the first side is top side so going to my resurfacing tool to do a pass at .5mm as I know nothing has cut in that deep in the past. it will then do the edge bit

Then next up going to make a grid that is 25mm squares each square corner will have 6mm hole in it for bolt holes. To going to use v-bit to make grid followed by 6mm end mill to make holes the will stop 1.5 mm shy of the bottom of the board.

Side 1

Side 2 will have 17mm x 1,5mm deep circles over the holes to allow for the nut holders to be recessed into the wood.

Side 2

the rendered model looks a lot better.

side 1 rendered. i have lessened the grid depth
Side 2 renderd.

The process

I have already drilled 4 holes in the board to hold it in place i need to still get some shorter bolts and counter sink the nuts but that will be done after i have run the program

Side 1

This is going to be a 3 tool change process. we are going to start with 22 mm surfacing bit to a depth of 0.5mm to clean off any damage done to board it will then run around the edge of the board, the second pass will be drill function using 6 mm end mill. Finally will run v bit to make the grove grid. and outer border.

Side 2

One pass 6 mm end mill and the job is done. this pass will cut 1.5 mm depth 17 mm diameter circle so the trended inserts can be countersunk.

Running the program

Side 1

So first up the skim. in with my surfacing tool and time to zero it. do love the z probe script written by Charlie look at my review on the CNC machine for more details. right all set up to go have no idea on speeds and feeds on this. ok first and the second attempt failed miserably think i know why my rpm was far too slow so gave up for the night. new day new vigour lol did some light reading overnight and found my Spindle will go up to 24000 rpm i was running way slow for bit size so have adjusted tool to 18000 rpm from 1800 will try this again today.

Ok i am dumb i have miss calculated the size of material doh re-run the edges then hit the soft limits so did some recalculations and then rehashed my board completely.

Luckily being CNC no damage done so the board adjusted the gcode and off again i went with the board skimming. so process 1 ended up as 3 processes dont worry have made adjustments to the master files.

Some pictures of the resurfacing process. in process.

The re designed board:

Side 1 redesigned.
Side 2 re designed

Next up the grid. so out with the 30 mm surface tool. in with the v bit and time to zero the tool.

right holes tomorrow and then time to flip the board. hopefully will line up not sure if i should enlarge cut out just as the flip is the unknown hopefully will work out

Now to swap tools and put the end mill in and zero the tool. before running the 98 holes that need cutting. all ready for me to press start later. as the son had his nap got vacuum over the baseboard.

cleaned and ready to drill.

Disaster forgot to enable the spindle when on a destructive path gouging through grid i then reset but it had moved waste board and then ended up drilling through the bed in 2 places destroying 6mm endmill in process. managed to save it by flipping board so going to start again and not be so tired when playing with CNC machines.

Redone first 3 stages now for the flip going to finish off by drilling manual thought 2 halves as not to risk damage.

drilling done.
side 1 done.

Back on track and only another evening to waste on the board cnc humour.

continuing on with 6 mm end mill so no need to zero the tool final run of the cnc machine for this project. Well, i thought that was going to be the case but no i was wrong.

going to be glad to see the back of this project lol.

Right, this has gone a little wired on me as most of the circle are circle but some are not i think its to do with the soft limits stopping the bit from moving i think i am going to have t rethink side 2 of the board. Depth has not penetrated the holes so going to have to drill each one manually. oh and final fuck up they are not central to where i drill through the board.

So back to program and time to rethink design. the joys of doing things your self lol ill be worth it in the long run though lol. going to skim the board by 1.5 mm and then should be able to finish off machining of the board. I hope.

side 2 remixed for the 3rd time

will run that tomorrow as had enough tonight and it is 1 am again one day i will go to bed early. its a curse.

Another day first up out with an electric drill and six mill drill 98 holes to do drilled and now am going bolt the board down and run the skim and dam it, I have miscalculated the skim by 0.25 mm so time to modify the program. and run it again went well till dust shoe dropped had to kill the cut 20mm from the end of the run. Right enough is enough mach 3 g-code editing here we go figure out where it turns to run the last side edited the code to start there and away it went job done.

all skimmed ready for t nuts.
front re done

98 t-nuts to hammer in to the wast board and its done.

can see the damage it di in the first run and the skim i had to do and now hammer time.
all hammerd in now to flip it hope none fall out and mount it back on the bed.

The finished item only took week to run in the end all a good learning curve as most projects are already thought of my next project for the machine just need to get some aluminum and some M5 screws. also going to make some 3d printed ones as well.

all done at last.

Now to make some clamps over to fusion 360 to make my own as don’t want to spend out when i can design and make it my self metal and plastic

So that will be then next project should have 3d printed side done buy end of the week. that will be part one part 2 will be me teaching my self fusion 360 manufacturing.

keep reading.