High end DIY wire EDM

hi there welcome to back gdm it's time for a new video uh one that I have been wanting to make for a long time now I'm going to update my wire EDM machine in particular the water system um first a bit of retrospect so here's my current wire EDM machine um I'm super happy with the machine mechanics and the arc generator everything works very very well and I'm using it to run production Parts every single day so the machine is perfect the thing that's not perfect is what's below the desk the water system now this thing has a lot of history into it um and it is still highly experimental though functional but it looks like a mess and it has quite a few downsides so some retrospect onto this setup the setup is now almost six or seven years old and I initially started out with a single cart or small aluminum welded frame that had three dish washing pumps um that I used and a small filter to get me going with EDM that was the initial setup well I quickly came to the realization that the dishwashing pumps weren't providing enough pressure and Flow so I had to swap those out but the motors I use or the pumps I use to swap out the dishwashing pumps they did not fit anymore into the frame that I had already welded so I had to put everything on the side now only one of the original dishwashing pumps Still Remains that's that one which I used to fill the tank and to perform the deionization and here are the two other pumps that I used to replace the dishwashing pump so here's a big centrifugal pump that I use for water cleaning so it sucks in dirty water and it spits out the dirty water at pressure forces it through these filters turns it into clean water and then goes into the clean water tank then there's the pump in the back that one here it sucks in clean water and it forces it at the high pressure 10 bar 2D flushing nozzles in the machine um yeah so the pumps did not fit anymore so I had to put them on the side um making it all very uh unorganized then I switched the initial water filter I used which was one of these small filters it quickly saturated with a particulates so I had to change the small filter I initially used with the big EDM filter for which I made a custom housing I still like it that works nicely but I wasn't able to fit this nicely so it's just sitting here on top of it um that also something that I would like to change but the big downsides of this setup our first lead it doesn't contain enough water so if I want to fill my tank all the way to the top or even three quarters there's not enough water in this volume the tank I initially used was a water waste tank from an RV uh purchased it new and then added some holes for the uh for all the lines to go but it's just it's just not enough also the water kind of quickly evaporates so I need to top it up frequently and then redo the ionization deionization that's already frustrating so that's number one problem there's not enough water in the system second problem is that I'm still using this dishwashing pump to perform the deionization and to fill my tank and it doesn't have enough flow so deionization can take like up to two hours if I put a lot of new tap water in it and filling my pump or sorry filling my tank can take like five minutes so it works but it's it's just way too slow and it's annoying the hell out of me and it has been annoying me now for five years or even more so yeah that needs to change um and switching to these uh quite high power centrifugal pumps um there is another downside which I didn't realize before is that when using such a centrifugal pump these have a low efficiency so not only does it consume a fair amount of power um it also heats the water now normally in an open loop system that's not really a problem but in a closed loop system it adds heat to the water in the closed loop system so the water temperature will rise and eventually in long runs making intricate Parts big parts that take a long time the water heats up all the way up to a Jacuzzi level which is completely unacceptable because thermal expansion then ruins the accuracy of my part so in order to counteract the inefficiency of that pump I had to add a cooler so this is like a fish tank cooler um so I had to add that and of course there wasn't space so I added more lines and put the cooler on the side and things like that so you know it works it's just a total mess and uh it's not nicely integrated so this this all has to go and this setup is not worthy of such a nice EDM machine so finally after all these years it's time to take this experimental setup that has taught me many lessons and turn it into something super nice and that is what this video is about so I've made a new design I'm going to build it um so uh let's first have a look at it in CAD so in Fusion 360 I drew a general model of the new water system integrated with the EDM mechanics basically to make like a complete machine everything integrated into a single cart now this model holds almost all of the key components that I use except for the big water pump that I use for um the ionization and filling the tank for that pump I couldn't find the cap model and what this model also does not contain is all the plumbing pipes and hoses so if you intend to clone this model then you'll need to root the plumbing yourself now there are three pumps two of which are shown in the model uh here's the uh send first centrifugal pump it sucks in dirty water from a dirty water tank and spits it out to the filters then there's the rotary vein pump this one that's used for the flush cups and then there is a very big third pump here not shown that is used for the ionization and for filling the work tank so here's a drawer that you can pull out that has the keyboard and mouse that's nice there's a stowaway then this is the electrical cabinet and that holds all electronics and so a lot of DIN rail mounted components I will go into details later uh here's a placeholder for monitor and here's my wire spool holder well I only Drew this pool here still uh need to make a model of the whole spool holder it's basically a super simple thing that just um holds the Spool in place with the rotary axis freeze such that the machine can reel it off small wheels these are high load Wheels the whole machine will have quite a bit of weight so uh I think everything on top of the countertop here weighs about 100 kilos and then this is an 80 liter tank and this as well so that's 160 kilos of water and then the whole frame so yeah I might actually weigh somewhere about 400 kilos is my guesstimate so I need some pretty sturdy Wheels to to carry that load it's mainly that the water weighs a lot and it contains a lot of water so um yeah so that's basically a tour of the integrated cards um so all key components that I used uh are um given in a list that is shared on bexedm.com I will share a link to the list below so that you can see for each of these components where a goblin uh what it's uh manufacturer is what its uh type number is and together with the cad model that should allow you to easily clone uh clone this this machine okay so enough for the general model uh let's dive into the build so for the water tanks I was looking for a tank that was easy to open from the side to get access to the internals for cleaning I also I was looking for a tank that wasn't all that expensive uh something that would uh fit my design nicely so I yeah I found these Square tanks well they're not tanks actually they're livestock feed drums um but they have a watertight seal in the cap and so uh I decided to uh fill uh fill a drum up with water all the way to the rim uh close it off and then put it on its side and leave it for a couple of days just to see if there were any leaks which they weren't so I think this type of container can be used for uh for storing water efficiently and then it allows for easy access to the to the inside from the side so the plastic is a bit thin so the side the sides builds a bit but the steel frame will support in that to prevent the bulging from uh getting to uh too bad so I think this is a nice and cost effective solution so 100 kilograms of Steel arrive today uh so I guess it's time to start welding and to start making the frame for my new water system thank you here's the frame build in progress starting to look like something still need a cross members a lot of stuff so the welding work is done now I'm painting everything so nice color of blue turning out nicely Okay small time Jump and here we are the frame has been finished and painted I also added quality plywood sheets and covered them in two component epoxy to make them water tight because you know it's hard to uh prevent oils pills you will spill some water so yeah that's uh turning out nicely so I have to look around here so I'm planning to connect to water tanks with these PVC pressure fittings I already drilled the holes through all of the tanks and through the plywood and yeah that allows me to uh hook them up which is in the next chore and another time Jump I added the drawer feature for stowaway of the mouse and keyboard that's convenient I also added four float switches for measuring high and low water levels in each tank and I added two out of the three pumps and two electrical valves and some hoses and here on the right side we can see the plumbing and water filters that I use for the deionization resin here in the back is the centrifugal vein pump yeah it's a about halfway done I should say or at least for the water system not for the electronics okay let's go through the main components of the water system um I will have a link in the description no points to a web page that shows the very detailed information about all these parts I'm just going through the numbers now and giving an overview um so for water filtering I have three filters there's a big custom enclosure that I made for the EDM filter that's 10 micrometers then I have a 10 inch water filter housing with a filter cartridge that filters up to five micrometer particles then I have the same housing with the filter that does one micrometer particles and these three filters will be connected in series and next to water filtering there's also water the ionization I've already fitted those filters the the ionization filters also reside in 10 inch standard water filter housings so you get the cartridge you fill it up with your own resin and then you put it in the housing and I have two of these in series so that's uh water filtering and water deionization then there are three water pumps a small one a big one and a really nice one here so let's start out with the small one um I'm using this one to um suck in dirty water and then push it out through the three filters in series uh this small pump is half a horsepower so about half a half a kilowatt uh this place is 2.2 cubic meters per hour in water volume at a maximum pressure of two 3.2 bars and then there's this big one it's a 1.3 horsepower about 1.5 kilowatts it displaces 4.8 cubic meters per hour at the maximum pressure of 4.8 bars and this big one is used to fill the water tank the EDM water tank but also to push the water through the ionization filters so that the the ionization can occur quickly so I I either do one or the other so filling the tank or performing the ionization and for that you should be able to switch um so I used two um electrically controlled valves these are Rain Bird valves um so one is uh yeah for fitting the tank and the other is for the ionization uh this is all in the making um everything still needs to be hooked up and connected all the piping and things routed so that's all in progress so that's the big pump and then this pump here is for the actual flushing of your work piece so these two lines go to the the sort of one line is the inputs the other line is the outputs and the output is forked into two lines which go to the upper and lower flushing heads so this instead of being a centrifugal pump which I used in my previous setup this one not centrifugal but a rotary vein pump it's a lot more expensive for the price of this pump you can basically buy buy the rest so I bought a kit of the pump heads this bracket the motor and this frequency converter and the kit was 600 bucks um but this pump being a rotary vent pump I can achieve higher higher pressures and it has a higher efficiency so it won't heat my water and therefore I can get rid of the big cooler that I used to use so really looking forward to start using this one it will make my setup a lot simpler and I can get higher pressure so that's uh that's really nice um yeah those are the uh the key components of the water system so here's a small selection of the parts that I will be using to um you know to connect everything together in my water system I really like this PVC pressure fitting system these come in all sorts of different types and sizes for most of my system I will be using 25 millimeter inside diameter so roughly an inch um except for the water drain tubes uh I will use 32 millimeter for that to make sure that the Gravity fat drain um drains quick enough so these PC PVC pressure fittings there are a lot of different types so what I'm using here mostly our knees [Music] t-joints these things hose pillars couplings these are really convenient so whenever you make a rigid piping system and afterwards you need to disconnect things and then you use these couplings for instance I use these couplings to connect my filter such that later on when everything's glued together I can still remove the filter I have a normal return valves here I use a couple of those manually operated valves in order to drain the tank when needed these are tank couplings a lot of different parts also a lot of different adapters so I use for instance this quarter three-quarter inch thread to 25 millimeter adapter for my filters um this here is my Hannah water connectivity sensor which I screwed into one of these adapter rings and then I glued it into a t-section and I will Mount this in water line going to the clean water tank that allows me to measure the connectivity so this hose has quite a limited Bend radius so whenever you need to make tight turns you use the knees and whenever you have a longer sections that are just curved slightly I use uh I use the hose um yeah that's how I connect everything together okay so another time Jump and my machine has finished so it was quite a bit of work a couple of weeks and I initially didn't intend to make or to cover it on YouTube and the amount of work involved I could have easily done like a 10 part YouTube video series but I have something else in mind for a really nice YouTube video that I'm currently working on um and while I was working on that I needed to update my machine because there were a few points that were annoying me too much so in the end I decided to make a video now the machine is done uh let me guide you through it so I can show all the work that I've done all right so it started out with the welded steel frame then added all the plumbing so there are three pumps uh two valves three filters and two deionization filters most of the lines are high pressure PVC and then a few lines which are low pressure I use just standard hose for that now I can drain the tanks when needed with this drain in the back here you could see the wire spool holder and my collecting bucket that holds the wire snipper wire clipper wire Chopper I should say so here all the shot wire ends up on this side there's the new bx18 arc generator I did not do a permanent installation for this with the bolts running through the front face because I need to test a lot of art generators in the system so I'm continuously swapping Arc generators out testing them so for me this is the most convenient thing I just added um like a shelf that has ventilation that I can easily swap them out here's the keyboard again this is a really nice feature and I made a really nice control panel so this control panel controls um the upper and lower flush cup pressure and it controls the three different pumps and the valves and I can choose to turn the pump off or on manually or set it to Auto in which case the computer has control over the pumps my G-Code can control the pumps then there's a main switch that turns on the contactor and then the single switch turns everything on so the Mini PC the screen the motor drives the arc generator everything the whole machine is turns on with a single switch so that's really nice there's a wall or D ionization controller which I can set to Auto and then it controls the uh water conductivity level so here's my existing machine I did not change change it I'm yeah actually I made two very small changes first change is that I added an additional hole which is now capped with a plug um that I can use to drain the water out the side instead of back into the system so as you can see everything is pristine now and super clean while before it was like totally cropped up with EDM crud so I wanted to clean everything and for that you need a special cleaning agent which is based on phosphoric acid and then when all that stuff is inside here you want to rinse the acid away without getting the acid in your closed loop water system and for that you need an additional drain so only for cleaning I use that additional drain plug and there was one wheel this little wheel um I changed it by increasing the diameter a bit because with the former wheel it was slightly rubbing here um now with the with the bigger wheel that robbing problems gone so they're those are the only changes I made there nice big screen this is the electronics cabinet I will cover that in a moment so yeah everything's on one integrated cart the only thing that you need is to plug in power and then the whole machine runs can run by itself right I really like about this compared to my previous setup is that yeah it's on Wheels I can push it around I can walk around it when when I need to service it or or I can place it somewhere else if it's in the way that saves me a lot of space and I don't have a lot of space in this shop so that's really valuable for me okay time to give a small demo so power in first let's uh let's fill the tank and before I do a small note the um water flow rate is really high so I used to fill my tank in like five minutes now I can fill the tank in just 30 seconds not all the way up up to the top but up to the Machining level in 30 seconds and that's a lot of flow if you were to just uh get a hose and get that amount of flow just out of the hose in into the tank the water will Splash everywhere so I made a special nozzle this one here that distributes the flow in such a way that even at that high flow rate it does not cause any splashing so I can fill the tank without water getting everywhere so um yeah that's a that's a nice feature so let's turn the machine on so this turns on all the power uh the computer is booting now so I can use my computer when Linux has finished booting so it runs on Linux CNC so let's uh let's fill the water tank I'll do it manually now normally I could also fill the tank with my G-Code but uh I'll fill it manually then you can see how fast it feels so that's like not even half a minute and I'm already up to Machining level so this is this is super nice it used annoy me a lot when I had to do a quick job every time emptying and filling the the tank took a long time but now it's it's super fast so here's my water connectivity level 22.9 micro Siemens at the moment um yeah I can start flushing for instance so here's the flushing it's now set to auto for computer control I can set it to manual now the pump ramps up I can control the uh the water pressure here as you can see this is the pressure through the flush cup [Music] [Music] [Music] so here are my level meters so um whenever red goes on I know the water level in the tank is too high and then there is a green light which shows the lower level if the green light is on then the low level is high enough to suck water from the tank in order to pump it around if the green light's off then the level is too low for the pump to suck so this is for the dirty water tank this is for the clean water tank and so when I start draining my dirty water and this green light goes on because the level rises and then the pump goes on and the filtering process starts so let me show you here this is something I still need to automate so I have a drain here um and the height of the drain determines the tank water level so I want to have something that is adjustable and something that I can automate because I reserved one switch to drain the tank manually or automatically so I need to make a controllable mechanism for training here that's not finished yet so at the moment I have to make my fingers wet I don't like it but it's uh I'll change that later I pull the plug everything flushes and then the pump will start as you can hear the pump is now starting green lights on so now all the water will drain from the tank into the dirty water tank and then it gets filtered and pushed into the clean water tank [Music] and draining is pretty quick takes slightly longer than filling about half a minute [Music] so now this one will turn off again and then we're done [Music] yep we're done so that's filling and draining okay let's have a look at the electronics cabinet so here's the cabinet uh as you can see I added ventilation so here it sucks in air with a fan and here it spits out the air I initially did not have the fan and the power supplies got too hot I added nice LED lighting in the door here I made a 3D printed thing to store the documentation that comes with the the parts and here's my water connectivity calibration probe that I use once in a while now here's the control cabinet I labeled everything so here's the XY Motor Supply the supply for the wire servos supply for the PC so this Mini PC here it comes with a power adapter it's like a wall hog I don't like that so instead I use the 12 volt adapter for a 12 volt Indigo Supply that's this one then I have a 12 volt peripheral Supply what that does is it Powers the LED lighting the fans the wire chopper motor everything that's 12 volt and there is a small Logic power supply unit then I have my ethercat motor drives this one's for the x-axis this one's for the y-axis I still have some space left for a third axis the rotation axis that I will add later in the future here's the speed controller for the um uh flushing pump the rotary vein flushing pump I keep forgetting that name I have a timer here that I use for the dirty water pump um this one is quite useful so there's a float switch in the tank and whenever the pump turns on or off there's like a wave in the tank which hitters the float switch so I use this timer to get rid of that heater and make the pump on and off turning Behavior a lot nicer then there are two solid state relays one for the water cleaning pump and one for the fill slash D ionization pump here's the main contactor to turn everything on and off and the rest is just a bunch of wires so there are not many components it's just this row of power supplies two motor drives and some solid state relays these are also solid state relays One turns on the wire chopper motor and the other solid state relay I use to have software control over this thing turning it on on or off so everything the whole machine Electronics apart from the arc generator All Electronics of the machine that's it what you're looking at here so yeah it's quite some wiring but the number of components is not that high this is not really complex to build I'll make a schematic of this so that you can copy it okay so now you have seen my new wire EDM machine and for those of you who want to build such a machine yourself I have documented everything so starting with the cad model of the machine mechanics itself I have detailed model of that and then there's a cad model of the overall machine so the machine mechanics integrated with the water tanks and the water pumps and things like that the cat mobile I've shown in this video um then I've made a key component list so a long list of all the components that I used where I got them what their type number is and things like that I've also created a software installation instruction that allows you to do the software install yourself on a new pc so the installation of Linux CNC and the vax EDM related software components and I've made a wiring diagram for the control cabinet that one's not identical to the control cabinet I'm using that wire diagram only does the the very basic stuff to get everything up and running and you can expand on that if you want to add features but the basic wire gram is more than enough to just get you going so all that information is shared on for free on backcdm.com and uh yeah that should enable you to clone my my machine and make something beautiful okay I want to close off this video with a couple of small remarks um things that I found out during my build so the first thing is that I'm using these Rain Bird water valves and those are intended to be used or to be driven with 24 volts ac and that's not really convenient in the control cabinet an ac voltage and anyway if you run them with 24 volts ac there are they're noisy they make like a buzzing sound which is super annoying and 24 volts ac is inconvenient in a in a electrical control cabinet so what you can do instead is run them with 12 volt DC do not run them with 24 volts DC because then the files will burn which you can run them with 12 volts DC which is what I'm doing and then I can use the same 12 volt peripheral supplier that is used to drive the fans and such for the valves as well so that's that's really convenient um then I got the centrifugal vein pump of which the motor cools itself so there's a fan blade to the motor axis that sucks in air but only if the motor RPM is above a certain level and in the EDM application the pressure is really high but the flow is really low and the motor RPM is quite low while the pressure is high so the motor has to deliver a fair amount of power at a low RPM and I ran it for a while and it got too hot because the RPM was too low to provide sufficient air cooling so what I did is I took off the uh the original fan blade from the motor shaft and I 3D printed an adapter to fit a standard 12 volt fan to the motor so it's that at all speeds it gets maximum air Cooling and then the problem was resolved um and the very last bit I wanted to mention the first time I assembled my complete water system and tried it out it was leaking everywhere um it turns out that using Teflon tape to seal threaded pressurized interfaces is a bad idea I always thought that was a good idea but Teflon tape actually does not seal that well um so it took me a while to figure out how to get these high pressure water lines completely tight so they were almost tight but they were dripping once in a while which is super annoying but for those connections so for threaded high pressure water connections do not use teflon tape instead use something that's called fiber seal um so this is tape that has fibers and sides and when the fibers absorb water they expand and then they really uh make a watertight seal for a high pressure fittings so I was unaware of that and it took me a while to get rid of all the leaks but this stuff was uh was the magic solution so I just wanted to share that as a very last point and that's it for this video and see you next time

Channel: BAXEDM

Views: 16,707

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Id: 8TnvU1INPSE

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2023