Help required from down under.

[penman]

Hi all,
ordred my PRS Alpha B32 in mid January. It was built and after a long sea trip arrived here in New Zealand in May.No damage whatsoever, A1 condition. Naturally I was very keen to have a play.Camped a board to the aluminium table, and "played" according to the manual. Keyboard mode, circle and logo. Going well, so tried actual cutting, actually engraving, anly 1/8" deep.Found that the logo was not cutting like the ShopBot one. It did not have the routed area under the pBo letters and had a diagonal line through the words from the bottom left of the S up to the top of the t. Also the circle's were cutting half size, 4" only 2" etc.Not to worry, one of the reasons I got a Bot was because of this forum and the help available here. George Charros on April the 24th explained on this message board to alter the [ VU ] to fix this. This fixed the circle ok, I think but the speed frightened the hell out of me. So I have downloade the latest control software and found out somewhere how to reset things back to default settings, which I have done. Right, fix a top to the AL table. Brady kindly supplied a file on this forum for the drilling of the top so it lined up with the drilled tapped holes in the table, I think quite a few appreciated this, so happily I downloaded this.In the new preview it shows 1" circles, and in practice cuts 1" cicle's as well. After this long winded intro what I want to know is how do I set things up so the X & Y is where it should be to correctly mark the places to drill the board.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as would any advice, but please be gentle with me as I am feeling very inadequate and useless at the moment.
Thanks,
Roger.

[dubliner]

Roger, everybody must be at a wedding !. I'm sure you'll get a better answer, but you could place a 1/4 inch sheet under your main board then you wouldnt hit the table & I presume the holes are spaced accordingly, so leave a bit of room & trim to fit, then the holes will line up. I'd guess its designed for xy to be 00, so you could raise the z, zero it & air cut to check where the plunges align. Maybe you could chuck up a pen laser to see where its going too.

[bill.young]

Hi Roger,

This video might help you get oriented...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCG9GOJWT2I

Bill

[acb]

Roger, I'm thinking that file might have been written and tested on a larger machine. The holes don't line up if you take the BT-32 table zeros, and you can't actually move the Y far enough to line it up in 2D offset mode.

I finally bootstrapped the process by using spray adhesive to tack a temporary board onto the aluminum table. Then I screwed down my permanent 36 x 24 board onto that, offsetting it enough to let me cut the file from the table zeros. After cutting I removed the temporary set up and bolted the permanent board to the table.

There's probably a simpler way; hopefully someone will document it.

[sawdust535]

Hi Roger,
Congrats on your new bot!
I actually made my 3/4" plywood top just by carefully laying out a grid with pencil and T-Square marking the location of the holes and drilled the holes with a hand drill. Counter bore first to clear the heads of the bolts making sure to make the counter bores large enough to clear the socket diameter. Then drill the clearance holes for the bolt shanks, making them slightly larger than the shank diameter to compensate for your holes being slightly off center. Once you attach your plywood top, then you can zero out your x and y and mark your top.

[penman]

Hi,
Neville, Bill, Art and George, thanks for taking the time to help. Although I am far away and was a bit worried about support this forum helped me decide on a Shopbot. The help you get here is just amazing.I had hoped to be over there by now for some training at Durham but owing to a couple of things cropping up I have been delayed. Maybe later this year.I have since run a speed test, which I read about here,and have discovered that the results are far to slow. One of my problems is not having actually seen one running, apart from You Tube, I really don't know what to expect and not.Back to speed.It is way down.This and maybe some other small things, grounding, are probally all adding up to cause me problems. Have some "experts" not CNC coming around tonight to try and sort me out. At the moment I am still dreaming about what I can do. Once again thanks for your supportand. I shall return no dought later with more queries and looking for help.
Thanks,
Roger.

[myxpykalix]

It generally defaults to cutting at 1.7 ips when you make files. You can change it in the file preparation under the tool tab parameters (I think) or you can speed it up on the fly by hitting the SHIFT > or SHIFT<

[dana_swift]

Roger- as near as I can tell you are in the same town! (Tulsa Ok in my case) Isn't the internet wonderful?

If you need to see something that isn't on Youtube, I don't mind making photos or a short WMV and passing along how I set things up. This forum will not allow WMV or AVIs due to the length of the files. But there are other ways...

Welcome aboard!

D

[davidp]

Roger

There are already a few shop botters in en zed There are I believe three in the Christchurch area and at least one in Auckland there may be others.

I believe that there are about 10 to 12 in Oz so you are not alone in this part of the world.

Send an email if you need any help.

Go the Wallabies!!!

[penman]

Exactly what I said is borne out. The help, support and encouragement from the menbers here needs to be seen to be believed.Thanks all for your efforts. I will certainly be asking for more advice as time goes on.

Had a computer wizz around last night to help with my speed test. We tried 3 computers and could not get a reading above mid 50's, so more investigating tonight.
Cheers all,
Roger

[penman]

Dana,
would you mind sending me an e-mail as I have a couple of questions and you have no address in your profile. Yes the internet is a great asset and Tulsa does not seem like the other side of the world.
Cheers,
Roger.

[dana_swift]

Roger- you have mail.

D