After a 10+ year hiatus, I should probably address the elephant in the room that was the genesis for this blog, the LASER rebuild. So this is a quick update for those that are subscribed and have been following, or may stumble across this down the road. Those that have followed along from the beginning have rightly thought the project is dead. In reality it’s not dead, at least not entirely, it’s mostly dead, but not ALL dead, and it might take a visit from Miracle Max to revive it.
So finally after about a year on the back burner, I finally managed to get some time in on the LASER. I have been slowly acquiring bits for the re-build over the past year, but this is the first real hands on moment I had for a while. One of my more recent acquisitions for the LASER was a 100W power sensor for measuring the output power of the LASER. The idea being that I would use it to monitor the health of the tube and my optical path once I got everything up and running. I also wanted to have an idea of what the real power was of my “free” LASER that had been sitting around for about 3 years before I got my hands on it, and then another year now on my shelf. So while the LASER was relatively new before being relegated to the scrap heap, a lot has happened that could have resulted in a drop in performance of the LASER. I’ve herd stories of the glass tube LASERs dropping in power output, even if just sitting on the shelf for a while… So I’ve been wondering if the same is happening to my LASER.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I took a 5 minute break at lunch to see if I could tackle the engraving table. As this part is $500 to replace, it will be a huge savings if I can de-laminate the top sheet of aluminum off of it.
Ouch my eye! 