My LEAD 1010 Build

Obviously, since many others have built and innovated off of the Openbuilds 1010 already, this is far from earth-shattering, but my LEAD 1010 is nearing completion.

I have powered the system, jogged the gantry and Z-axis, and run the "Hello World" example enough to satisfy myself that the machine is functional.

The power supplier is mounted below the tabletop on the right hand side using aluminum L-brackets. The only interesting part of that is that I use avnuts instead of nuts and bolts to put the one necessary joint in place. The other connections were directly into the threaded holes in the power supply and SPAX screws into the tabletop.

The wheels on my carriages have all gone whompus. I think this contributed to a disparity between the left and right Y axis carriages and a clicking sound that happened when the carriages neared the front. I will be attempting to properly adjust the wheels on all the Carriages (or trollies, if you like) before running again.

I opted to use Powertec T-track for the spoiler board because, frankly, I had it laying around and wasn't doing anything else with it at the moment.

In order to not eat up too much head space, I routed the channels for the T-track into the MDF. This resulted in a fine layer of brown dust being applied to everything in my garage shop as the wind was out of the south and MDF returns to its default particulate state when hit with a router bit. I also messed up a fair bit until I "got into the swing" of setting up my router guides for the cuts. (Hence the orange hammer in the one picture. One slot too tight, one too loose, the others close enough to right.)

In order to have the T-track just shy of the mounting surface on the MDF, I had to cut just a hair over 3/8". That did not leave a lot of MDF to hold things together. Fortunately, it didn't collapse between the saw horses and the 1010's bed, so that let me install the T-track using short wood screws and Gorilla Glue. The use of the GG will give strength back and fill in gaps. It does have to be cleaned off after cure, though.

The reason I am using the T-track the way I am is because I plan on using dedicated tooling boards for cutting parts. Most of what I intend to do are EPP model airplane parts, flat EPP airplane kits, and then basswood nose blocks and wing tip blocks for wood sailplanes.

I will also do thicker plywood parts for things like motor mounts and landing gear mounts. For thinner material and balsa, I have a 100W laser.

Anyway, current status is: waiting on rubber feet and additional M5x8 mm screws. I am also waiting for some commercial clamps from Powertec, although I think I will end up with a lot of custom clamping due to the weirdness of the materials I'm working with. I am also waiting for additional T-track so I can fill up the center slots. I also ordered a new Interface controller today so that my son can run jobs on the 1010 after I develop the programs and the PC is busy running the Laser.

I am going to do some DXF transfer testing with the Openbuilds CAM. I'm not entirely sure it will get me what I need for multiple cut files for a single job with bit changes. I am far more comfortable with SketchuCAM, but I feel like I need to understand how that would work with the difference in HOME position between the 1010 and my old Phlatprinter.

 

Thanks, Peter!

 

Build complete. Now working on clamping fixtures for EPP foam. Need to order a few odds and ends to set up router relay and address MDF board curvature.

Am planning on obtaining 2 x pieces of 20x80 V-slot and cutting them back to 350 mm to add 100 mm of head space. The extra large kit from OB is a bit much for my needs.

 

Quick update: completed rebuild to add longer 20x80 to the Y-carriages. After doing some measuring, determined that 350 mm was too much and instead went with 300 mm. Have hooked up my IOT relay power strip to the toolhead output so that the router power is now Blackbox controlled. Added a connector to the router LED ring wire so that I can disconnect things to move the 1010 around without having to undo the wire harness. Added additional L brackets to address a curvature in the base tool board that must have crept in when I routed out the channels for the aluminum T-slot material.

With the added head space, I now feel much more comfortable about being able to avoid any head crashes into clamps provided I remember to run the Z axis up to the limit switch at the end of a job in the GCode before transiting back to Home.

My son is finishing editing the video we made to document the Z-height modification. I will post a link when we're done.

 

Ran a self-generated Gcode job on the 1010 this morning to try and understand the difference between the Openbuilds generator and SketchuCam. It became immediately obvious when I hit hard interference and had to abort first try.

After resetting based on 1010 home with offset set to Zero, the X axis-Y axis functionality became clear and the job ran with no issues.

I do like the new rubber feet on my 1010.

Next step is to secure an actual piece of stock and run the job for real. 2 programs with a bit change in-between.

 

I should also note that the readjustment of the carrier wheels succeeded in addressing any Y-axis offset issues. Returned to Home with no appreciable offset on Y-axis arms.

 

Ran my first cut job on the Lead 1010 yesterday. It was both a success and a resounding failure.

Did not obtain any usable parts from the run, but learned quite a bit, so it was worth the consumption of a sheet of 1" EPP. Some of my lessons learned:

1) Do pockets David the Swarfer's way (set material thickness to required pocket depth, set pocket depth to 100%). Separate out different depths as different programs then join them together so that you have more accurate pocket depths.

2) 100 is a fine speed for the spiral 1/4" upcut bit. 50 is fine for the tile cut bit when you only take 1/4" bites. Slow down to 25 for fine cutting on thin sections with the tile bit.

3) The bottom of the Z gantry needs to be taken into account for Z-axis operation. I was actually dragging the bottom of the Z gantry around on the top of the foam during deep cuts with the tile bit for cutting operations. Changing the bit depth and re-zeroing fixed that, but the Z gantry was still a threat to clamps even then. Fixed by repositioning the router head so that the end of the router extends below the Y gantry by roughly 19 mm.

4) Re-zeroing with the OpenBuilds probe is awesomely easy, but may not be 100% reproducible in locating the cut head. I had to re-run the program a couple of times because of issues and it seems like internal cuts are not lining up, which may go directly toward the probe zero varying. Additionally, because of bad directions on my part, the probe got left where the Y carriage could damage the magnet wire as it traversed, so I actually had a situation where the probe was not working and the EPP got squished as the head actuated during the zero cycle. Replaced the wire and fixed the issue. Will now keep the probe in a holder off the front of the machine. Tool changes in operation will have only Z axis re-zero. Will not do the full probe zero set.

5) Was not able to use OpenBuilds CAM. When I attempted to import the DXF file, an arc kept getting flipped on its side for some reason. Without a rotate and snap function, there was no way to repair this. So I went back to the tried and true SketchuCAM.

6) Discovered how SketchuCAM output resolves for the Lead 1010 via the BlackBox and Openbuilds CONTROL. Now have my head squared up with the axis of the machine relative to the axis of the CAD/CAM.

7) Ran into a weird issue where the job aborted and the head returned to home. Attempting to re-run the program resulted in the head repeatedly Z actuating until the position switch threw a code. This occurred even if the head was sent to project zero first. Issue resolved by power cycling the controls and rebooting the computer, but this of course required re-setting the work zero, which may have affected cut alignment.

8) Important to double check the surface variance between where you do your zero and the furthest extents of the job. Even billets that look even may actually have significant height variation if you don't perform a surfacing op before running the job. Ran into this with the extra tail boom I added to the project before I understood the axis orientation between SketchuCAM and the Lead 1010.

 

My son helped me put together a video showing how we added 2" to the LEAD 1010 head space using 20 x 80 mm V-Slot from the Parts Store. Next video will be talking about calibration and more wheel adjustment due to head crashes.

 

Wanted to post an update:

Here you see a pair of final proof cuts that contain actually sale-able front Push-E Cat fuselage halves. The sheet on the right just barely made it and showed me that I cannot use the vacuum brush. The bristles actually caused cut quality issues with short back-and-forth cycles.

That said, the deviations were subtle enough that I could sell them to customers with no qualms. The sheet on the left is, for lack of a better description, as good as I am like to get it. Primary issue is not wanting to "plane" the foam before cutting, which means that very shallow cuts are hard to keep consistent.

I have the tail booms to do yet and shallow cuts are a requirement for them. I imagine that I will have to locally zero the Z axis for the main area of concern.

That said, with the help of the folks here on the forums, an old dog learned enough to cut new parts.