Making A Full Size CNC Plasma Cutter for a Small Shop

how's it going guys the day has finally come I'm gonna rebuild my plasma cutter clearly this has been a long time coming this is the first CNC machine that I ever built and it's kind of on its last legs building this machine absolutely changed my life it changed the way I work with metal and I feel like it opened up the amount of stuff that I could make in less time so while the machine is very loved and appreciated it's a total piece of [ __ ] when I built it I made no way to replace the slats that's like a solid three quarters of an inch of boogers the X motor is held on with a clamp because it started cranking this way and the belt would fly off we got a bunch of random tubes that are just cut and zip tied everywhere from upgrades that I tried and failed to do the floating head is a 3D printed part and as you can see it's really begun to melt badly and it's held up using bearing wire that is true Precision nothing wrong with that and the biggest problem of them all it's only four by four with a cutting area of approximately 40 by 30 inches we got a shed now and I want to cut full sheets oh not messing around let's hop to it as you can see I've already cut all the tubing up for the frame I spent nearly all day doing this which that's not something I'd normally do but the more accurate these cuts are the easier everything else is gonna be so it was worth the time now then start throwing the frame together this I gotta go wash my face this is not really in shot there we kinda go this is going to be the outer frame of the plasma cutter as you can see it's almost the same height as me that's worrisome because I am gonna have to drag this frame back there when I'm done building that you can kind of see the shape of the machine we're gonna have a linear rail at the end of this one at the end of that and the Gantry is at an angle from Plum the way that this thing is gonna work is I just come in and lean a sheet of metal on top of it basically making the footprint of the thing nine feet by three feet which is pretty manageable I'm just gonna tack everything together until the frame is fully constructed and I know that everything is square parallel all that good stuff I'm building it properly this is so unlike me anyway uh I think I need more space so to the driveway you know part of the reason that I don't plan my projects is I think it makes a better video that way to uh slowly limp my way through this is all planned out where's the conflict in this story I haven't done this in a while but I think the best way to get through building this Frame is a montage the crazy mother [Music] [Applause] [Applause] what about [Music] you we've got our basic frame put together now is our opportunity to um demonstrate one of the problems with my existing plasma cutter this is the problem see I made the width of the table 48 inches for you know a four by eight sheet but that was forgetting that these sheets come at 49 inches so every time I gotta buy steel I have to cut a whole inch off the side I'll be real happy to never have to do that again now then let's take a moment of silence and enjoy this old guy's last big job foreign [Music] thank you [Music] wow seems we've had a bit of a dramatic ending you've done good man rest easy this is a part to hold the linear rail it goes on the frame just like that [Music] wow like that times 17. the linear rail can go on there just like that this is what will hold the slats that I can install on the bed to install these all uh straight I've gone ahead and clamped this 1x2 Square tube across the whole thing I can come in set the piece in place clamp it down and weld it up I just got to do that uh I think like 80 more times no problem [Music] all right about all the welding on the frame that needs to be done I got a friend coming over to help me move a chicken coop I think I'm gonna try and sucker him into moving this but I want to finish all the welding first so I gotta sheet this thing real fast I think I'm just gonna do 16 gauge on the back of these one inch pickets so okay no time to mess it around let's do it all right what if we get it up on like some pipes not the copper bro soccer these are parts that will make up the Gantry these go together just like that so this is the start of our Gantry this is where the stepper will Mount and this is just for some idler pulleys now to attach this to the frame of the machine we're going to use this linear bearing that I made in a previous video [Applause] [Music] I got it this all runs pretty dang smooth and it's tight now the only difference between this and that is I made two and I cut the bottom off of them now that's all fine and dandy as you can see I plan for these to be bolt holes but I decided they're plug weld holes efficient and I had a bit of uh didn't see it coming in CAD problem with this bearing where the stepper motor mount ended up colliding with it so I just installed it before welding it on and it's trapped there forever I doubt that I'll ever have to change it because there's so many bearings taking up the force here but uh yeah oopsie now then go throw these on the machine all righty got these installed on the machine and honestly this bearing that we had to uh basically trapped forever was super helpful all the other bearings are adjustable and without a fixed Point that's how you end up in uh optimization hell but basically I adjusted the bearings until this thing is square to the bed and moves pretty freely now it's loud but growing it's in a shed now we can start building the parts that mount to these aluminum in an effort to make it a little bit lighter I'm going to build the rest of the Gantry out of aluminum now the old plasma cutter kind of does a nasty job of aluminum so I gotta cut these all out by hand but we can take this as an opportunity to show that you don't need a CNC machine to cut out funky patterns you just need access to a printer this is the uh Matthias wandel method here we have our quarter inch plate of aluminum and here are all the parts that need to come out of it so we can just take regular old glue stick now the kind you used to sniff in elementary school the good old days ah get that thing glued in place if I was smart I would have cut one of these edges so I could line it up but I'll never claim to be smart but at least I can learn I did it with the rest now you got a bunch of uh dirty pictures glued all over a piece of aluminum nice so then let them dry so you can come in and center punch all the holes now you can use your cutting tool of choice to cut all these shapes out and then drill the holes out later when I built my original plasma cutter I did this all with a grinder now you can imagine that was a Sparky flamey mess this time we're gonna use this Harbor Freight scroll saw it was on sale how could I not this is what happens when you spend three videos building a bandsaw when you have no space for it and end up leaving it outside and stealing Parts off of it and yeah I don't have a bandsaw anymore so see how this thing does bam really doesn't seem too bad oh man that is slow maybe I need a different blade he should have came with some no different blades Harbor Freight look at this piece of trash even with nothing on it the base vibrates uncontrollably but I found cutting eighth inch material isn't as bad as cutting the quarter in so I guess we'll use it but I'm gonna try and cut as much as I can just using a circular saw and then use this to get the funky Contours then once we finish all the parts and throw this thing in the trash where it belongs [Laughter] oh Harbor Freight [Applause] now imagine that but for a half a day Wham and here we have all of the parts that we need for this look at that finish some may call it a trashy finish I just hit it with some 100 grit sandpaper and I thought that the dull kind of finish looks pretty dang cool so dig it it's not entirely because that's the easiest finish to do so let me show you how these go together we've got a couple stepper mounts these install and they're respective little slots it's been quite some time since I last take welded aluminum let's hope it's like riding a bike [Music] probably be helpful if I turn the r going on dang it [Music] not good but also not bad I'll take it I mean I think most people would argue that it's pretty bad but you know it screw them so with all the stepper mounts welded in place we can now install this piece and this is just like the square two pieces that we made using two inch it gets the same bearing setups as the other ones this goes right there as you can see these tubes now have caps with tapped holes in them those can be attached to this plate through these holes like so now you can attach all three of these to this plate like that then we can go to the other side and get these things welded on a plate you like my third hand [Music] just like that we've turned our pile of 2D Parts into 3D parts now we can start building this thing this guy is gonna hold our bearings just the same as the other Square tube just like that now the other side gets a ball screw as well as a couple linear rails here you can see my first big oopsie plan for this to have linear rails that go all the way to the top here but those are not the linear rails that came Amazon rather than returning them and getting the proper linear rails like any uh sensible person would do I made it work we're gonna have the same amount of travel for the z-axis as I planned for but we only get a half one of these bearing blocks per rail I mean it should be fine it's just a plasma cutter if I find that doesn't work then I'll be taking this apart putting the longer rails on and getting two of these on but for now I'm okay with living with it whoa whoa now then the ball screw gets a spacer then we can install this plate somehow or this gets fastened to the ball screw and to the linear bearings just like that now when we spin the ball screw the Gantry moves now then this plate also gets some linear rails and then on top of these rails goes this plate so this will act as the floating head for probing the metal and that'll work by throwing a button up here like so and pop in a couple Springs up here so now this can be driven down into the bed once the tip hits this will be pushed up until it hits that button and it'll know where it is beautiful now then real quick I gotta add a mount for a limit switch for the z-axis I'm just gonna sneak that in right here just like that and lastly we just stick a stepper right here beautiful then on the back side of this we get another stepper motor with a 10 millimeter GT2 timing pulley so this gets attached by two M5 machine screws then on the front two it gets a washer then an idler pulley and a spacer just like that so now we've got a free spinning idler on there see where I'm going with this whack another one on the other side like so we can loop our belt through here this is how it's gonna drive the Gantry back and forth all right pretty nice huh all right let's install this on the linear rails don't worry about the mess it helps me concentrate so this goes into here like so I've also got this piece which will slide onto the third rail hopefully won't interfere with anything it's kind of looking like it's going to interfere oh God didn't think that through uh oh well we got a problem [Music] let's see our hero has made yet another stupid mistake how will he overcome this did he just spend a whole video making a heaping pile of trash find out next time on dragon balls all right I'll admit that got a little unhinged I wasn't quite sure how to come to a natural ending with this one because I filmed it as if it was going to be one video because naive old me thought I'd run into no problems and build a plasma cutter in two weeks clearly I don't really learn from my experiences so cutting it here this feels like a happy middle or I'm sick of editing one of those two well while I got you guys here I got a couple of things I want to bounce off you one if I were to sell plans for this plasma cutter would any of you guys be interested too when I first built a plasma cutter the hardest part for me to figure out was the electronics and the setup of Linux CNC there's really not that many videos on YouTube on that so I I try to stay away away from tutorials because uh I'm no role model but if you guys would be interested in seeing a tutorial on that let me know in the comments for both those things that's what I got for you this week if you like what you saw leave a good old dinger think about subscribing and thank you for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Cranktown City

Views: 65,948

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Id: T-vQkJGF1Ts

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023