Safety considerations
Posted by
tommym6@x...
on 1999-07-22 19:28:56 UTC
Hi all,
I,ve been reading the posts for a couple of weeks now, though offline- I can't get the time on my pc (teenager with a 24/7 habit!)
One thing I havn't seen mentioned is safety considerations. Some of this seems obvious but you never know.
A good freind of mine worked for a CNC conversion shop some 20yrs ago. He had a few suggestions based upon several years experience;
1. Put a large, easily accessible kill switch in place. Good for personal safety and could save that vice or table from having a big hole milled in its center.
2. Watch out for getting pinned, crunshed or pierced by table moves, the steppers and servos are very powerful!
3. With servos, if you loose the encoder feedback, the machine will run away. See #2. There may be an opportunity for the servo card to sense encoder loss and failsafe.
4. Some of these system described use a lot of electrical power. That makes heat. Put electrical stuff in a metal box, no combustibles. Ground it. Properly fuse it. When parts get too hot to touch, consider installing a fan. Watch out for exploding components. Transistors and capacitors can fail with a bang and flying shrapnel!
Keep safe and have fun making chips!
Tom
I,ve been reading the posts for a couple of weeks now, though offline- I can't get the time on my pc (teenager with a 24/7 habit!)
One thing I havn't seen mentioned is safety considerations. Some of this seems obvious but you never know.
A good freind of mine worked for a CNC conversion shop some 20yrs ago. He had a few suggestions based upon several years experience;
1. Put a large, easily accessible kill switch in place. Good for personal safety and could save that vice or table from having a big hole milled in its center.
2. Watch out for getting pinned, crunshed or pierced by table moves, the steppers and servos are very powerful!
3. With servos, if you loose the encoder feedback, the machine will run away. See #2. There may be an opportunity for the servo card to sense encoder loss and failsafe.
4. Some of these system described use a lot of electrical power. That makes heat. Put electrical stuff in a metal box, no combustibles. Ground it. Properly fuse it. When parts get too hot to touch, consider installing a fan. Watch out for exploding components. Transistors and capacitors can fail with a bang and flying shrapnel!
Keep safe and have fun making chips!
Tom