Ouch my eye!

Do not look at LASER with remaining eye!

December 2011

Post Index

  • Possibilities

    For those of you that have been following along, you will remember that the X rail for my old ULS-M25 is badly warped from the fire. To replace it with an official part from ULS will cost me $365 + taxes [or about $13.50/inch for the 27 inch extrusion]. Needless to say, this is a unpalatable price for an aluminum extrusion. So I’ve been trying to come up with possible replacement solutions that are more cost effective. The first step was to create a CAD model for the existing part to serve as a reference. While my model isn’t exact, as it is based on measurements of the damaged part, it should be close enough to serve its purpose.


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  • The wiring harness

    Today I took on the relatively arduous task of mapping out the wiring harness as it will need to be totally replaced. Fairly large portions of it are severely burnt/melted, more than I had initially noticed/assessed. For the most part it it is fairly straight-forward point-to-point connections. I started with the door sensor loop, as it is the most damaged.

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  • X motor PCB’s

    Almost forgot, there is a pair of small PCB’s that need to be mapped… The PCB that sits over the X stepper motor, and the one that connects the flex cable to the main wiring harness. For all intents and purposes these two PCB’s can be thought of as a single PCB, and that’s how I’m going to handle them [it looks like ULS looks at them like this as well, based on their component designators]. The main wiring harness plugs into the lower PCB which is bolted to the chassis. This PCB simply passes the signals onto a flex cable, that runs the signals up to the upper PCB, which then breaks them out for the X stepper motor, and the X & Y homing sensors. With the exception of a handful of capacitors, and a couple of resistors, there really isn’t anything to the PCB’s.

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  • Second Sourcing: Belts

    So now that I have my quote in from the ULS rep for my list of parts, I thought I’d go through the list and see how much of it I can second source from other suppliers outside of the ULS umbrella. So for starters I decided to go with what is most-likely the easiest part to find elsewhere… the timing belts. Now I don’t know much about timing belts, but figured they were an off the shelf component. So after doing a little research online, I discovered that the pitch/profile for the belt is known as MXL (Miniature Extra Light). I wasn’t sure on the material of the belt, but I did come across a spec that stated it was Kevlar re-enforced. After searching he usual retail suspects [McMaster Carr & SDP/SI as well as few others] it became apparent that the material must be urethane. So armed with that information, as well as the length  and width specifications for the replacement belts, I came up with some pricing:

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  • The front panel (part 2)

    Today I took on the front-panel control/display board. The board is pretty much charred as you can see. It has quite a few traces on it, but is fairly simple in function, thus making it relatively easy to decode.

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  • The front panel (part 1)

    Today I took a bit of time after work to map out the membrane keypad of the control panel. Unfortunately it was badly burnt up, so unusable, and I didn’t take the best of care pulling it off.

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