The Cutting

You can see the four valves for the four vacuum regions of the bed, at the bottom part of the machine. Also on the far left of the machine, below the orange warning labels, there is the mobile calibrator kept on the body of the machine as it is directly connected to the machine.

Once you have loaded your file, you need to choose the point where the machine will start its run, the workpiece origin. For X and Y this is simple, for the Z it is bit more complicated. to move the axis you can do it in two different ways, either via the handwheel, which is useful for precise locating when you want to see where the drillbit lands exactly as you can control the head while away from the keyboard. Or you can use the manual controls in the software, that allow you to finely control the head.

These software controls were quite useful. As I was the first of our group to run these cuts, it turned out that the material was thicker than originally was meant to be. So the cuts needed to be run several times, dropping the head further down. The initial material thickness was supposed to be 11mm, but running at that depth the material was no where near cut through.

So we had to cheat the machine, and to zero it lower on each run, to make sure the head doesnt get damaged we had the spindle running so when it plunges into the material it cuts a hole for itself instead of ramming in. The first run we dropped the head 0.5mm but even then it did not cut through. so we had to drop the head two more times, 0.25mm on each time, until we started to see the sacrificial surface through the material properly.

Once you have the head where you want it to be for the job, you need to reset the W. Coor. for the software to tell it that this is where the origin is for this job. You just click the button for each of the axis to confirm that this is the zero point for this job. When using the mobile calibrator, the Z will have a value of 45mm. The software sets it to compensate for the height of the calibrator, and usually the Z doesnt need to be specially reset. If you do reset the Z after the calibration, the machine runs the job in the air, letting you actually observe the movements it will make without making any cuts.

Then you just run the job, by pressing the play button. It is always a good idea to review the code before starting, to see if there are any funny commands that dont look right.