C-Beam wiring.

I am at that point where I need to wire everything up and at first I am just going to get everything 'out of the way' but I am wondering if anybody has pictures of a completed C-Beam that has decent cable management going on. I am going to have the power supply and CNC xPro in a separate enclosure and have the interconnects worked out.

My main concern is going to be the Y axis since the motor is sticking out the back and I haven't figured out a 'clean' way to bring the motor leads in to a wiring harness.

Ultimately I would like everything coming up into a drag chain that I already have and then out of the enclosure for the C-Beam.

Any suggestions would be appreciated

 

I just picked up a copy of MeshCam, can someone tell me what post processor to use with the xPro card?

 

Grbl

 

So, I finally finished building and wiring my C-Beam over the weekend. Bought it when they had the sale like a month ago and taken me this long to get around to finishing it lol. One thing I'm immediately noticing is the Y travel. In the aluminum plate cutting video on the product page it seems like he zeros the Y much closer to the edge than is possible with my build. And the way he talks about it, he seems to indicate it could've have gone further back but he purposely left room in case he needed to screw the plate down.

Mine hits on the met Y build plate before it gets even as close as his zero appears to be in that video. You can see in my video below where I was testing movement, that is as far forward as I can go on the Y. The metal plate attached to the Y gantry plate for the wood to mount to hits the black end cap on the Y axis at that point. I'd have to raise it probably at least another 10mm to get another 30 - 40mm of travel before either the motor gets int he way or the Y gantry itself hits the end cap. (Excuse the mess in my video, I need to clean that room up, projects have been kind of piling up on the sides hehe)



So I'm just wondering if I did something wrong in the build, or if this is a standard limitation of this build. The C-Beam page lists the spec with a Y-axis travel of about 11"... but with this plat hitting it seems more like 9.5 maybe 10" to me. I haven't measured the actual movement to the other extreme, I'll try to do that tonight, I'm just estimating since I know I cut the boards there at 12" x 12".

 

Yes the spacers are there, I don't have a problem with the MDF clearing, it's the metal plate on the other side of those spacers that hits. I'll try to get some better pictures tonight but I'm about 2 inches maybe a little over from the edge of the 12"x 12" MDF. In the aluminum cutting video it's looks like it's closer to 1 to 1.5" from the edge there. Of course I don't know if the MDF board in that video is 12 x 12 or not, and with videos it's sometimes hard to get an actual aspect on things so it could just be more and just can't tell from the angles and such.

 

I was thinking the spacers as well because I realized after making some alternations to the mounting (I wanted something really solid) it wouldn't clear and rather than put them in, I ground down the tops of those end plates so I can clear them.

I couldn't tell from the video the full travel so can you show that or take a picture at both extremes?

 

I went home for lunch, didn't have time to actually mess with anything on it but I did just a quick measurement and it looks like it should indeed get just over 11 inches of movement the other way. So I guess what I have is the standard setup, with my board at 12 x 12 if I move it to the other extreme the bit is going to end up ~1/2" past the end of the build plate (I checked and my bit is 1 1/2" from the front edge at the one extreme). I'm assuming this is due to the positioning of the X axis. I suppose I could slide the entire X axis forward an inch... Don't know if that'd cause any other problems or not, but if I did that then I should be to get within 1/2" of the front and back edge. Thing I can think of that sucks the most about doing that is having to extend my Y axis motor wires since I already cut them to length to make things neat ... *sigh*

 

I did something similar to you for my Y plate. First though I built the machine completely standard and used it to cut a 12"x 12" 10mm thick Alu plate with all of the holes required to replace the standard Y axis build plate. Basically I made holes for the 4 wheels and one in each corner tapped to hold the MDF scratch plate on top. However I also cut a rectangle of material out of the middle front and back to make it go round the end mount, stood up it now looks like a big wide H. I don't have a pic and i'm not at home at the moment but i think you get the idea.

I cant quite make up my mind if yours is this config or you've just mounted the 10mm Alu to the top of the original build plate and missed out the spacers. If its the latter the plate should go over the end mounts if you add the spacers. If it's the former some additional work may be required on the Alu plate.

Edit: OK just saw the 2 posts above, yeah best idea move the gantry forward as GaryUK says, you'll get a bit extra

 

Interesting idea, using that idea if you can clear the motor with your build board and moved the x axis to the middle of the y axis, you could theoretically increase the y axis workable area up to a little over 18". I don't know how stable it would be with that much overhang though hehe. Something to possibly mess around with later though

 

if you added linear bearings/rails I think it would provide the required support

 

Wow 18", I just went with the standard 12" x 12", my requirement was just to make it all accessible, although if you did that with the XL... lol

I have also considered the rails on either side to add more stability, might be the next upgrade.

 

Yeah lol, thinking about it a little further you wouldn't be able to get quite 18" without doing rails because of the spacing of the wheels on the y axis. If you spaced them 4" apart, you could get possibly about 15 - 15 1/2" of workable area. If you used rails on the outside of the yaxis however you could extend the rails out to get the full 18+ inches without hitting the end plates with wheels.

 

I,

like others have bought this kit as a start in the CNC world, I have enjoyed using the basic C-Beam, but now I have upgraded both the X and Y to supported round rails, and 1605 ballscrews,

Before I went to the Y ballscrew I raised the bed with strips of 25 mm Ecocast tooling plate on top of the supported rail carriages with the bed also being 25mm Ecocast, this then clears the 500mm actuator C-Beam, as I wasn't using the v-slot wheels or plate this meant I got around 460mm travel of the antibacklash nut ( I needed a block on the nut as well bolted to the bottom of the bed), I have 1200mm rails so it looks very strange compared to a standard C-beam machine.

I think the ability to do almost anything you want is absolutely amazing .

Cost is the only limiting factor for me.


Michael.

Now got a 650 x 600 mm bedsize, next mod is to make a moving gantry machine (OX - Like)

 

Hi !
The 1000 x 1000mm model on the picture is almost the one I imagined. Do you have the SketchUp file to share with me ?
Thanks in advance.

 

I understand.
In fact, this week-end I worked on my design and found a way to :
- make the work size more larger than your's.
- use less rail material (20 x 20 instead of C-beam for the Y) and have more rigidity at the same time.
My design is hybrid as it uses 20 mm plywood.
You will find it attached.
I did not found C-Beam actuator bundles with X-large Plate. Why ? Is it possible to replace the standard ones on request, or do I have to order separately all the components ?

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi, its not that clear to me the difference between the C-beam machine and the OX CNC machine.

Obviously, the one uses v-slot and the other C extrusions. I see that you arent selling self assemble kits for the OX any more...

Do the two machines have different intended use cases? Or, is one more a beginner machine than the other? Or, is the C -beam machine an improvement on the design of the OX?

 

Many thanks Mark. What a great product!

 

Hurrah - finally got to doing some actual milling this weekend, even if it was only an MDF test piece.

Very satisfying to go from lines in SketchUp to actual cuts on a work piece. This was just using a 1/4", 2 flute, carbide bit. Feeds were 2000mm/min with the DeWalt 26200 router running at full speed:-

 

That loos neat ,cant wait to get mine runing. ordered my Dewalt 26200 its on its way. Hopefully mine will be milling soon!

 

Next job is to design a dust shoe to fix to the z-axis pillar ie. so it's independent of the Z axis' movement.

Been looking at some examples here for ideas:-

Dewalt DWP611 Dust Shoe

 

Can anyone tell me if there's a place I can get hold of one of the 3D printed router clamp shims for the DeWalt D26200 in the UK?

For the time being I've just used a few layers of duct tape which seems to work okay, but looks a bit messy.

 

What is the intended software stack for the machine; to go from STL file to cut part?

 

Just an example of what the machine can do if enlarged to 39x39 or 1000x1000. I look forward to see what youve done to the machine at that size compared to what I have.

 

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