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.
So I finally got my quote back for all the ULS parts this week. It came in quite a bit higher than I anticipated. While most of the items are tolerable, some aren’t. [all prices are Canadian, and don’t include the 13% tax I need to pay as well]
Well today I decided to try and salvage the flying head that carries the #3 mirror and focusing lens. I had pretty much written it off, as it was partially encased in molten glass & plastic. It also fell into the fire, so I assumed the worst for the parts of it that I could not see.
I decided to fire up the laser again, and get some pictures this time. So while I was at it, I decided to check the beam alignment between the visible and burning laser beams. I also got some pictures of the test set-up.
Ouch my eye! 