£150 CNC Plasma table build - Easy, Quick and cost effective

[Music] so [Music] so [Music] g'day and welcome i'm joshua delau the designer blacksmith and i swear to you guys that you can build your own cnc plasma table just like mine for around about 150 pound mark if not cheaper and as you may have seen already it's working fantastic so without further ado let's get into how to build one right so just before we begin as you can imagine there is a lot of information in this video so what i've done is i've broken it down into chapters so all the information that you need you can look in the description and find exactly which point you need from the software to the gubbins to everything so do check that out there's also some g-code snippets we'll get into that in a little bit more uh but right now let's talk about how i built it so the gangtry is actually a repurposed laser engraving machine this was given to me by a website called banggood now i raised banggood because i actually bought quite a lot of stuff from them including the camera that you've seen all of my latest videos with that all came from the website banggood now banggood have offered some discounts uh you would not believe up to 70 80 90 percent off in some cases this machine was called the auto laser master ii it has a bed cuttable bed size of 400 millimeters by 440 millimeters and when i chose this machine it was rated on their website for only 150 pounds and you can even get ones similar to this that are even cheaper you buy from amazon however and you're going to at least 300 sometimes even 600 pounds for a similar machine now the thing is you can actually buy all the extrusions all the little parts we'll have a closer look at those you could build this with you know is is bits and put them together yourselves it's actually not that difficult uh but for me literally this took me less than a day to put together and it's got all the movements it's all calibrated and works brilliantly right so when we're talking about the 150 pounds i do mean just the gantry which is the most important part including all the software and everything like that so you will need your own plasma and compressor to go with it now this one is cnc compatible and only cost me 235 pounds there will be a link in the description this goes up to 50 amps and will cut 20 millimeter thick steel i've tested it so it's very important to know you can't just use any plasma machine you need to use a non-high frequency pilot arc and the reason is is that your torch is never going to be touching the steel it needs to create an arc that will bridge that gap but it also can't have high frequencies because you'll destroy your controllers however even in non-high frequency machines there is still a little bit of high frequency so you'll want to protect it so after much experimentation i put this plastic pipe on mine to act as a bracket for the controller which is this part here that gives it a good distance away from the machine where there's potential high frequencies and being plastic it's insulated away from electrical currents so if we look at the torch bracket that i've made here one feature linking to what i've just spoken about is this ground wire now this goes all the way back to the machine's ground and what happens is as the high frequencies travel through the torch they actually gather on this plate and instantly ground back to the machine protecting the rest of the gantry and since doing that i've had zero problems so my machine originally came with this laser module and i can still use this module just by reattaching it with the four bolts and connecting the correct leads so i'll just dismantle this now and i'll show you how it all comes together the first thing i do is detach the ground secondly i'll detach this wire this wire used to connect to the laser and now it operates the relay switch which turns on and off the plasma torch so my plasma torch is actually mounted on a tactical scope bracket and it's 30 millimeters in diameter and fits it just perfectly so it's just hand tightened on this dovetail bracket that i made this is just a piece of aluminium and i ground it to have these 45 degree edges and the whole thing just slips off like that so as you can see it comes off very easily and this is all super lightweight and can get packed away and even hung on the wall which i'll show you all right so i've elevated my cables up and that keeps everything moving correctly just by using piece of wire and some magnets i've got a metal roof so i can do that and that just simply comes down now i will create something a bit more better than this this is just a bit heath robinson but it works brilliantly and i will consider this for getting all of my cables off the ground if needed so there you go very very simple so this torch specifically didn't come with the machine this cost me 13 pounds believe it or not which is a machine torch specifically it's a p80 a panasonic torch the consumables are rated to 100 amps so it's double what the machine can produce which is excellent for longevity and i can honestly say that the tips do last quite a long time and are extremely cheap compared to the competitor machines out there so all these wires you've got your earth you've got your torch you've got your pilot arc cable the switch which goes to the relay here we'll talk about that in just a second and of course you've got your ground and connecting these bits is no bother it's just very standard so there's only one other modification that really needs to be said and that is what i've done with this wire here so on the relay itself you've got signal positive and negative and if i remember correctly you can see the wire here the red is obviously positive the black is negative and the white is the signal or otherwise known as pwn pulse width modulation now these were the wrong way round so i had to just get a little tall poke these wires out and rearrange them so they fitted the way that this relay switch wanted to be and i've mounted my relay switch using a 3d printed part now you don't have to use a 3d printed part you could create your own other little bracket out of anything really um but i've got a 3d printer so it was very easy for me to make right so to get the torch in the right place you can obviously see that it's adjustable so this basically reattaches onto there and i like to have roughly a three millimeter gap so far what i've tested three millimeters works about right when you haven't got control in the z-axis to be able to do a pierce height as they call it having it at a medium height a mid-height works quite well this attaches there this attaches here and we're ready to go so you might already be thinking that this space that it can cut is a bit too small and that you'd need to have very small bits of steel but actually because the whole thing lifts off like that and it's very lightweight in fact if i get the weigher on it let's say roughly seven pounds of weight that's nothing for a cnc machine so that essentially means i can take it on site it's very portable [Music] but more importantly it can take any size of steel [Music] the only thing i'm limited to is the size of the part that i can make so just very quickly you don't need a table like this you could actually use uh your plasma on a set of trestles or anything uh but i made this this was actually a pro two type forge that i had designed uh it's meant to be fold away and all this kind of thing uh but i ended up not going with it in the end but what i have done to keep uh the steel a little bit of a distance away and to keep everything level so i made this aluminium bed and all these are our self-tapping screws so when they get a bit knackered like this one here for example i can simply snap it off and unscrew it and then fire a brand new brand new one through and i actually got a pack of a thousand of these for very very little money and a beautiful thing is is i can actually put this on top of my work table and it's keep giving it the correct distance so i'm not going to affect the work table at all however the idea that i have with this setup is one i could easily put this in a tray full of water and upgrade it to a water cooled method but using this old put repurposed forge i can actually put some extraction in the side of this and so all those toxic gases can be pulled away now what's also quite beautiful about this belt design is i can manually move the head wherever i want it so if these are ball screws i wouldn't be able to do that it would have to all be done on the remote but i can actually manually get things where i want them to be and so we'll see how that goes shall we so i'm operating the machine using a cheap tablet i got this one on a special deal for around about 50 pounds and works fantastic and works as like an offline controller because i wouldn't want to use the laptop in the workshop like this it's too much dust but the good thing about tablets are they don't have any fan vents or anything like that so they remain in pretty good condition and 50 pounds compared to a 600 pound computer is uh definitely worth doing you can obviously just use your phone but i didn't want to have my phone linked to this thing just in case and the other thing you need is one of these adapters which turns the usb into the otg adapter type c that goes in there and now you're able to connect with the machine so if i just turn on my laser machine it will automatically home [Music] and now it's telling me that it wants to connect okay so up here it tells me where the machine is currently and it's all on zero i'm going to move my uh head to the correct position where i want it to be just manually so these options here this is the main control i've got some presets here for lots of different things we'll talk about presets in a minute they're quite important but if we go to this little menu here that brings us to the file page and it will upload the file clicking this one here so these are my g-code files we'll have a look at how to create a g-code file in a minute but i'm going to select the one that is for the floating skating head attachment which is this one now we're all set and all ready to go so just need to press play so we'll turn on the plasma machine and we'll start play there you go so to lift the parts out i've simply got a magnet on the end of a chisel here [Music] so you'll notice here that i've just marked where the holes go but i haven't gone all the way through and that's on purpose just so i can get some accurate uh hot drilled holes because you can see it doesn't quite do holes perfectly but then again you get what you paid for but uh that's absolutely fantastic for my needs so for me i've not been doing this very long and i need to figure out what the perfect settings are for making minimal dross this is three millimeter thick material and i'm running at 850 millimeters per minute and now the machine will actually go up to 9000 millimeters per minute which is incredibly fast and is excellent for engraving believe it or not so i can actually cut out a shape but also engrave it as you can see that i did with those uh holes just there uh but in the meantime whatever dross that i do have lingering on is very easy to just remove with a chisel [Music] so a quick wipe with the grinder and that will just take any sharp edges and any bird bits off now there may be a lot of settings that i can change to get this working more perfectly this is gonna have to come with practice but i'll share all of my feeds and speeds in the description for those who are wondering what i use [Music] [Music] so some of you who are more clued up to cnc plasma cutting will ask questions about thc which stands for torch height control so for those who don't know thc basically reads the output voltage of the torch and that voltage will change depending on how far away the torch is from the steel so that can get measured as a signal and then adjusted with a z-axis controller so a motor will control the torch head up and down depending on what that voltage reads meaning that if the steel slightly bowed or or things start peeling away as is common with very thin materials at least it will self adjust the torch height so you get a consistent cut so obviously this system that's currently on here is fixed once you've made the height if the steel's bowed there's nothing you can do about it but it's very simple however i have a solution of my own version of torch height control that little plate that we just made is actually part of the new floating skating torch head so it basically has omnidirectional uh roller wheels on the bottom these are only one pound each i bought pack of six so very cost effective it's mounted on a linear rail and as you can imagine as it skates around the material this goes up and down giving you a consistent height we'll test it now on some corrugated steel and see what you think so you can see this isn't heavily corrugated but it is very thin and things will move and warp all over the place so this will prove to be a very good test if our floating head works so so that was like a worst case scenario for the floating head attachment and you can see it did a fairly good job i don't know why it missed this line here though but that leads me on to the next thing g code snippets and i can show you how we can cut this without going back to the computer or anything like that but i can create that line back again but uh i mean obviously i need to play with settings a bit more is a little bit rough in the cut but i think that proves it's quite successful it didn't get stuck it glided over all of these parts and it managed to keep its constant height throughout all of those undulations so let's go back to the tablet and we'll figure out how to correct this line shall we so let's talk about this this is grbl controller and this is an app that you can download from the play store it's free or you can get the paid version and you get a few more range of options now i'm not sponsored by these guys but it is probably one of the best ones that are out there as far as cnc control goes and you can not not just operate a laser but you can operate a mill and all kinds of other things in fact my other cnc machine that i've got for engraving and things i also control it off this device also so this is the main screen so you've got data on where the x and y axes are so x is going that way y is coming this way z is going up and down but we ignore that one because we haven't got a z so you can see in the background that i can move the cnc machine however i like just using the controller this button here with the house on it that's home so i can click that once before homing cycle yes and then what there are limit switches on the cnc machine and that will take it back to the furthest corner that it can reach so these buttons here are up and down for the zed but we don't want to do that these are saved options here so you've got g54 g55 g56 g57 those i can actually plot out specific points so for instance if i move the torch over to the right hand corner there that'll do it's got the coordinates of where it's at here so i can save these coordinates as a specific place so i can press and hold g54 save current position yes and then if i move away or do a homing cycle [Music] so g54 selects the position that i want to go to this button here is how you click to go there so click that hold and click go to position zero yes there we go so let's choose another location there we'll save that as g55 yes let's perform a homing cycle we'll save that is g56 right so now depending on which of these i've selected let's go back to g54 i then can press and hold this red button and it'll take me straight there [Music] and it does it fast g55 will go straight there [Music] back to g54 shall we and why not go straight back to the home position where we wanted to do but a bit quicker this time [Music] oh so somehow it's gotten stuck and you can see a little red bell has popped up that means that it's sensed that it's struggled at some point and is come up with an error so i can click that error off like that save the machine whatever's happened and do a homing cycle so now everything is now zeroed so these are other menus so you've got this one here that's your file so you can press play go a little bit faster change some of the speeds as you're going this button here hold some of the presets and you can also put things like probing the feed rate is 9 000 millimeters per minute that i've set it to you can obviously change that right if we go to the last menu here this tells you what code you're using so if you've done something and you're interested in what the code is you can actually copy and paste what it says here so that's a little bit of background it's playing with it all you'll figure it all out just like i have but let's go into some actual code now if we go back to the first menu you've got this other bar of uh buttons here and these are completely custom customizable so i've got one l three l and six l now i've actually programmed that to be one millimeter thick three millimeter thick and six millimeter thick a long hold will give me a line of 100 millimeters at the correct speed that i've set it to and i've also got a preset for just a piece just to test a piece height or a pierce duration how you customize these you go onto the top bar up here see the three dots click those go on to settings you want to go down to juggling preferences and then custom buttons so these are all my custom buttons let's just have a look at custom button number one and then we'll look at my short click commands right so i've put this code in a description so all you need to do is copy and paste it in there so i'll just explain a little bit about what you're seeing because code when you first see it is so confusing and a little bit scary for most people but i can break it down into a simple language for you g00 command is it finds a destination without turning on the x is the x axis the f is the speed so it's basically it's gonna go to x of zero at a speed of nine thousand then m three turns it on turns on the plasma torch the s is the spindle speed of five hundred i found that to be the optimum uh for turning on and off the plasma torch and that's all that's needed that's also uh a value for the laser cutter then g01 f9000 is a movement command but i have to put that in place otherwise it doesn't turn on the arc so although i've told it to turn on here and i've given it a plot it won't turn on until unless i've given it a movement command even though we don't want it to move to do a piece g04 command is to dwell to hold its position before doing the next thing and p is 0.25 of a second so quarter of a second and then m05 is to stop so once it's turned it on you need to have it to stop thereafter so how can i use this now to actually uh cut something let's have a look at my long click command now you can see here the first part of the code is almost identical to the pss because it's creating a piece before it starts and you need to pierce it before you carry on going otherwise it doesn't cut so well but this extra bit of code down here you can see g01 that's another movement command on the x-axis by 100 millimeters that is at the speed of 3000 which i found to be good for this material thickness which is about half a millimeter thick so again this will be in the description for you to copy and paste you don't need to fully understand all of it in order to make it work but if you do pay attention to the g01 on the x-axis you can also put a y-axis you can even put a circular command in there but for now let me just show you i'm going to change the 100 to 400 millimeters so what that's going to do now is it's going to cut a line that is exactly 400 millimeters let's just test it quickly so what i'm going to do is i'm going to move the torch to where i believe that line begins which is about there i believe and we'll do our long click ready one two three so there you go using some scrap material you can easily make some some shapes now this isn't obviously the neatest of things i've ever created but there is great potential here so let's get the laptop out and we'll see exactly what we need to do to create a file to be cnc cut right so aid all of you blacksmiths and metalworking entrepreneurs i have created for you 81 different flower and petal designs this is a download package that you guys can get off my etsy account which is just down in the description so quite a popular thing to make amongst yourselves is rose petals so if i show you the design right here very quickly so if those are looking a little faint and that's because this is a scaled down drawing printed one to one this equals about six meters by three meters so i've printed it to fit page so we've got the alphabet going this way and then we've got numbers going this way so b5 is this one here and i'll show you what that looks like in the cam software right so welcome to sheet cam we're going to be using this for all of our plasma cutting it's a very professional program you can download it for free or you can pay for the commercial license which allows you to do a lot more things so the first thing you're going to do is you're going to go over to options and click on machine this is going to give you some options here we're using jet cutting but you can use it on on a routing device um so you'd put on a rotary cutting if you choose to so next we're going to go to post processor here you want to choose grbl plasma i have everything in metric and if you're using my files you also want to set to metric because that's what i'm working in and in working envelope my machine has a maximum working size of about 400 millimeters but depending on the machine that you're building or you have you can increase the size of it here the next thing we want to do is install a new tool so we'll go over to this side here and click on the icon that says create new jet cutting tool so here are some options and i'll go through these you've obviously got the name you've got the type which is plasma path rules none for now curve width this is the important one to notice so this is the thickness of your cut so that can be anything between one millimeter to three millimeters depending on your cutting nozzle and everything will be offset on this so if you want to cut out a shape that's exactly 100 millimeters for example it will offset that by the thickness so it all the parts come out at exactly what you've chosen it to be here is the feed rate we'll change this one quite often depending on the thickness of material we're cutting piece delay that's an important one you'll want to increase that on different thicknesses of steel for now i've got it on a quarter of a second now pierce height plunge rate and cut height is all for machines that have a z-axis now if you don't have a z-axis you want to set all of those to zero otherwise it will spark an error as it tries to move the z-axis but there isn't one present now lead-ins where it begins the cut it does it slightly away in my case i've set it as three millimeters and it'll kind of arc into the drawing because there's always a bit of scuffing where there's a pierce and so keeping the pierce away from your actual cut line is ideal right click okay so let's import a drawing so if we go on to file go all the way down to import drawing and the dxf file in the download package that i'm giving you guys is called generic flower patterns one it's a dxf file this is ideal for cnc cutting we'll click open scaled to metric start it in the bottom left-hand corner right so here are all of the patterns so what we want to do is just pick one of these and move it onto our table which is this little square here you see not all of this will fit in there so what we need to do is go up to this corner up here and we're going to click on edit contours that now enables us to select one of our flowers box around this one this is b5 we're going to right click and we're going to move it to a new layer we're going to call this layer cut so i'm also going to click on it do a right click again and i'm going to move it to a new part and you can see it's now highlighted in orange so i'm going to click another one here that we can have with it i think we'll select one of these sets of leaves over here so i'll highlight around that right click move to layer cut and also move to new part right now i'm gonna unclick on layers layer 0 that's everything else and that's given us just these two parts so now i want the move tool i'm going to select the rows and i can independently move this around and place it on the table there i'll select the petals as well and we'll bring that over there and we'll zoom into the bed so i can now nest these and i've got the positioning down here so we've got x and y up and across a is the degrees now i can actually change the rotation by editing that degree button there let's say for example i did want to turn the leaves over i've got them selected if i've gone to degrees i'm going to type in 90. now it looks like it's gone missing but if i zoom out just disappeared over there that's because it rotates around its origin so we'll just drag that back up and as you can see i've now placed it 90 degrees so now we want to create a cut path so we need to now go on to this box down here and click on the top icon to create new jet cutting operation so this you'll need to confirm a lot of things i've got my feed rate for three millimeter thick material i'm happy with everything here so i can click ok so it looks like we've only got the leaves highlighted for cutting that's because it's only selected that part for cutting if we click on the other part number up here you can see there's no operation so we need to click again an operation for that one and click ok and now we've got both tool paths and if we zoom in you can actually see the direction of the tool path with the little arrows but we can actually do a simulation now if we go up to this corner up here you'll see a little blue drill bit it says simulation so let's click on that and at the top here we can either do 100 or 500 and this is all to do with speed so if we want a real-time view we can put it on roughly 100 and click start we can make sure that there's no obstructions and that everything is working as it should be if we zoom in up here you can see the little tails coming in those are the lead-ins and that's going to enable the part to be nice and cleanly cut so now we're happy with this we can stop the simulation we can make our way to this top left hand corner on the icon that highlights saying run post processor if we click that we can now save the cnc toolpath i'm going to call this rose and it's as simple as that there's obviously a lot more things to do on here we can look at those in a future video maybe okay so i've copied the file now to my controller if i select it here if i go on this menu folder rows perfect now before i actually uh run it with the plasma i'm going to just test it with the plasma turned off and therefore i can see if it's going to fit on my steel nicely so start streaming yes [Music] and then if i want to increase the speed i can click on this which is forward 10. you can see the values going up there and you can hear it so i'm pretty happy with how that's turning out i'll stop it there we'll turn on the plasma so there was a definite change of quality on that run the uh petals came out fairly good but uh things started to deteriorate on the leaves and that is all to do with the nozzle the nozzle is now worn out as you can see it's starting to blow out of the side so what i'll do is i'll take off the shroud and with the special tool take off the nozzle and inside is also the electrode and that has got quite the depression in it that is completely gone that has that's what a fresh one looks like completely flat and remember not too tight when doing this and i almost always replace both at the same time and i treat it as a consumable like i would any other apparatus in the workshop such as grinding discs or tig welding supplies the ceramic shroud however that can just go straight back on that's basically good until it breaks now what i've personally discovered is that drost tends to get worse and worse on the deterioration of the nozzle and the first time you use a clean nozzle you basically have minimal if not zero dross but it's one of those things that you'll learn when when's the right time because you don't want to attempt a job and then ruin it because the nozzle is all caked so to create the g-code you need to use cam software so sheet cam was my choice but to create the files that it'll accept like dxf files you need to use cad software now that's going to be left for an entirely other video but sheet cam still has some powerful tools you can still create basic shapes it's got a whole library of shapes and you can set the dimensions in there and in this case i just used sheet cam to create some holes so you see i've got some box section just running under the machine now we're going to plot three holes that was done entirely on sheet cam so what i did is i squared the box section to the frame so if all is correct i shall now put three holes that are 25 millimeters round [Music] [Music] so with the new nozzle they came out absolutely brilliant nice and in line i am very happy with those and they came out to dimension so having this tool is now going to make slots and other kind of things on box section extremely useful and there are so many other options i can actually get a roller y axis so i can do pipe and i've even got an idea on how i can make it do box section three dimensionally but we'll say that for a bit later let's wrap this video up with what i would do to build my next cnc plasma machine now i had already been collecting lots of parts i've used nema 23 motors this is a closed loop version so it remembers where it's been and i've even bought a z-axis so the whole point of building this really simple version is to learn what all the limitations are and building the next one and so far i'm really happy with the results so there's only a couple of things that would really change one being making it a lot bigger now i've pointed you to this wall for example because i've got plans for it right here this rectangle is approximately two meters by one meter which is the standard sheet size that you can get so my thoughts are to create the gantry that fits within that square but also folds up and clicks up when i don't want to use it i may get a water table as well with a pump and a filter maybe with some suds that as far as i know helps with dross problems but as far as drives and belts and things i think i'm going to copy something very similar to what's on this machine let's have a closer look at them so you can see clearly how this thing works it's literally just these 3d printer wheels v-block extrusions you've got timing belt and these little nema 17 uh stepper motors bit of cabling plug it to the controller and away you go now i've quickly gone on amazon and have a look at some prices so the wheels for example are eight pounds for ten these nema 17 um stepper motors are only 30 pounds for three you get three at a time the extrusions are 20 pounds a meter and the grbl controller which also has the drivers for powering the stepper motors is only 26 pounds the belts themselves with all the little fittings is only 12 pounds for 5 meters so without even checking bang banggood for me to build a brand new one that is two meters by one meter big it's only 156 pounds plus a little bit extra if you like for the cabling and the plates but i mean i can salvage that but the price these machines go for you would not believe so when i was looking into cnc plasmas i did actually check with one of the uk's leading manufacturers and the one i wanted came to a whopping 20 grand now if you think that's expensive friends of mine who had already bought one they paid 40 grand for theirs and it's still not working right now i propose this question if you're paying that much money are you going to get that much more performance and i would argue that you're not the cut will only be as good as the plasma torch itself and so if you've got a really good quality make of plasma that is as good as the cut is ever going to be everything else to create the movement and the software there's not a lot in that really but still if there's a manufacturer out there with two wishes to challenge that i'd be very happy to have a look at their machines so do check out my links in banggood i do get a little bit of a commission if any of those sell but they are honestly really good prices there now for my long-term subscribers you will have noticed that there have been some delays with me creating video content that's because actual paying work is what gets in the way most of the time so it's entirely up to you guys but if you would like to support this channel financially and to get more videos frequently and of topics of a wider range then youtube is offered a super thanks it's in an icon below under where the like and subscribe buttons are if you click that you're able to donate money to this channel and we can make better content nonetheless i hope you found this content really useful and i'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments section and until next time happy forging life worth living see you in the next episode bye

Channel: Joshua De Lisle

Views: 672,737

Keywords: Joshua De Lisle, review, how to, metalwork, make, build, settings, reviews, blacksmithing, comparison, compare, comparedto, blacksmith, tool, manufacture, wow, industrial, amazing, Plasma, cnc, plsama table, diy, profile cut, laser, home made, machine, welder, welding

Id: xVZZfx9KPlc

Length: 40min 59sec (2459 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022