It’s a Hall effect sensor. Mine triggers on the metal in the x bearing. The gap is only a few mm, so it might just be out of adjustment.
Put your head in the center of the machine. Power it up and press ‘esc’ to stop it’s homing cycle. The machine won’t know where it is, all of the x, y and z axes numbers will be useless. I have a hand on the power and the other to press ‘esc’ repeatedly. Always seems like it’s not listening…
Once it’s up, you can take a screwdriver or something ferrous to trigger the sensor. Usually they light up when they are activated.
Morning Willie, IDIOT of the week here, the laser head on mine doesn’t have the adjustable bracket, i had a vague memory of adjusting something but it was the 2nd mirror bracket
Looking at Jacks picture, the lightweight head holder is for these machines
He got it from Russ Sadler of RDworks. You can buy the bracket from Cloudray, but it’s for the wrong machine. Send me a DM and I can send you the parts list from Russ and his e-mail. Seems to be a very nice guy.
Finally received my amazong “24 hour support” from OMTech, a new head will be $40 and take 2-3 weeks. Going to hedge my bets and order one, whle I get some acrylic and see if I fabricate a bracket that will allow a different head.
As Russ will tell you these machines are a ‘generic’ design, modifiable by any of the manufacturers.
Most of the expense dealing with Russ’ parts are the shipping costs from the UK.
One of the things I like about this head is it’s elegant simplicity. The areas you need to get to are open and easily accessible. The ‘rack and pinion’ of his is a little more complicated and heavy, but substantially reduced the noise of it operating. I was pleasantly surprised. It also has a place for m2 and incorporates a Y adjustment. So the theory is that the tube handles X adjustments, m2 Y adjustment and m3 Z adjustment.
I also dropped over 700 grams of weight off the X carriage. Acceleration is at 50,000 mm/s^2 and I have run at 1650mm/s. Great fun, high speed, but the acceleration is where you lower the work time.
The tubes themselves are from Cloudray. Along with a selection of different lenses.
When I put my new head on, it didn’t have enough Z adjustments. I put it back to original and cut some parts to fit the head and m2. This was greatly assisted by Russ’ mentoring. I had a relatively good result, then I got a modification ‘in the post’ from Russ to assist me. Won’t get that from anyone else.
Don’t know how he joggles everything, but it was the best experience I’ve had with someones ‘add ons’.
I was engraving some tiles and you had asked about registration… Here are a couple of shots of how I’ve been doing it… It’s a progression.
I’ve got me floor plate drilled at 50mm on center. I use them as alignement. I cut the screw holes, then mount the template in the machine and cut out the part holder.
I do like the idea of a slatted sheet that I can tap and drill to hold jigs. Not too crazy about cleaning it after every piece is finished though. If a jig consisted of a piece that covered the entire bed and had honeycomb below it, there’d be more airflow coming through (something I will test and let people know if it works) otherwise I like the idea of one slatted steel sheet.
Yeah, I’m going to hedge my bets while I figure out some brackets. Should be too hard but finding the tube setup will be.
When you cut they burn and a lot of the ‘oils’ condense on the plate. When I’m done I just wipe if off with alcohol or acetone. There is no place for them to ‘stick’. If you use a ‘scrap board’ then the excess laser energy is doing the smoking.
I raise mine about 5mm above the bed and most of the energy of the laser is history by then. You can’t really clean your scrap board, like the honeycomb, once coated or soaked up difficult to dispose of the residue without a total replacement.
We won’t even go into how many of them are not flat…
Hi Willie
That is all good information, but Russ is not from RDWorks. He is just a very clever and extremely helpful man who has developed these China Blue machines way beyond their initial design specs.
By chance does anyone know the password to a knock of Ruida controller? Model RTK332N? Omtechs 24 hours later replies are so vague they aren’t useful. Telling me to reset the “focus axis” which I assume they mean the tube itself and it’s focus length. The password they provided does not work. And they don’t reply on the weekends so it’ll be another week or so.
I am going to make head brackets for this thing next year.
“We have forwarded your video to our supplier and they suggested you need to adjust the setting in the software and the laser head doesn’t need to be replaced temporarily.
Please enter the software first, factory setting, the password is RD8888, and then modify the distance of the focus axis inside.
If after then you still have an issue with it, please get back to us and we will offer further help here.”
They might have purchased the company, and yeah, if they don’t know their own controllers password…
By the time this thing is setup I’ll be retired and in a nursing home. I can’t even get them to send me a link to just purchase a head.
I’m going to buy a cheap head off AliExpress and found a place that will laser cut and prototype a bracket. I’d like to have this thing running so I can at least make some fricken Christmas presents!
Now I’ve just got to figure out CAD to design the bracket once I get the head.
Fun times.
If ANYONE wants to design the parts needed, I’ll order them and send them a couple for free. Since there’s a minimum, it appears a simple bracket made of titanium could be done for around $5 total.
