As to the OP question about the merit of the 5-axis head. I ran an OMAX 55100 with their 5-axis Tilt-a-jet for a couple years before that situation ended after which I bought an entry-level Maxiem for my own business and never looked back. The 5-axis option would have added 50% to the cost of...
Some options for laser cutting 1/4" steel, prices wildly approximate:
No-name laser bought direct from China, questionable safety, $40,000
3DFabLight, made in California, $80,000
Bodor from China with U.S. support, $100,000
Bodor as imported and sold by Laguna, $150,000
Vytek Fibercab, USA...
Coming up on 8000 pump hours. Over the long term, everything exposed to the ultra high pressure water is a consumable part - after 9 years not a single high pressure pump element, tube, fitting or nozzle component is original. With good water, the pumps are pretty reliable - support advises...
We bought a Maxiem (OMAX) 1515 (62 x 62" work envelope, 62 x 88" table) 9 years ago. It's been great. The software is awesome for what we do.
We stock mostly 48x60" sheet & plate - either half-sheets or cut from coil to our specification, about 40 different materials/alloys/sheet...
A job so simple I prepared no extra blanks, only the exact number of waterjet-cut blanks as what could possibly go wrong. Just a bunch of 3/8"-16 form-tapped holes in steel - spot, drill, chamfer mill, tap. Both the spot and chamfer ops done using a carbide 1/4" 90 deg spot drill.
On the...
The 4x4' fully enclosed 1000 watt fiber from Rose / bescutter.com shows as $73,000. Laguna wants around $140,000 for a visually and functionally similar machine made by Bodor. That's quite a spread for what to my eye is the difference in support between two U.S. based importers.
Laguna...
Congrats and good luck. A brake like that is in my future.
I'm happy with dies custom made by Riteway Brake Dies, reasonable price all things considered, they can make whatever you want for less than most of the equivalent one-off crap listed on ebay.
One thing about American style brake...
Curious to hear from experts. My sense is the way a brake control and back gage handle reverse flanges has varied over the last 30 years. Flip fingers are basic. The geometry must be right to avoid crashes and not sacrifice accuracy. If the pivot is too high it can jam. If too low or not...
Assuming the question is for me - a Maxiem, w/ 20 HP direct drive pump. It's one of the first units from 2010, it's a basic 3 axis machine, simple and pretty awesome.
pics at
MetalCreatureVashon (@metalcreaturevashon) • Instagram photos and videos
The picture would help. The reality of forging or press forming an open part can be pretty complicated. Openings pre-cut in a blank may not wind up where you expect them when the die closes. You can do a lot with a simple die. We do all sort of odd stuff using waterjet cut blanks and...
Regarding abrasive. I've used Barton 80HPX (crushed from hard rock), 80HPA (alluvial), Shape Ecojet 80 (shapegarnet.com), and two other no-brand 80 mesh products. For our relatively low performance setup - .011" orifice, .03" mix tube, 50ksi, the best garnet choice has been whatever is...
Thanks, because it was flaky at 9600 and higher and fixing it's not presently high enough on the list. Figure something isn't configured right, I agree it ought to work.
There's a balance between the control, the CAM and the type of parts being made. I like the Fadal control. There are occasional parts we make with only basic contouring features, but BobCAM still generates 500K bytes of Gcode, and sending that kind of program at 4800 baud gets old. The...
The 3M control as sold in 1984 was built from components about state of the art 1975. The heart of the control is an Intel 8085 8-bit microprocessor with 4K bytes RAM. That's the kind of computer I started programming in 1975 and so there's a soft spot in my heart for that hardware - thought...
In 2010 I bought a 1984 Mycenter 1 for $3000 which I thought was a fair price at the time. It was functional, clean, complete, with tooling, manuals, and an upgraded ROM that enabled drip feed and helical interpolation, but it was too much trouble to depend on it, and deal with the 3M control...
I'm reminded of a recent tour of the local Nucor mill, watching the melt furnace control board as the 3 giant water cooled graphite electrodes lower slowly into the scrap charge, and stop when they're white hot and the board shows they're pulling a steady 50 megawatts from the grid. I think...
OMAX/Maxiem/ProtoMax makes machines over a 10X cost range. Some are steppers, some are servo. Some have positioning feedback, some are open loop. The low-end machines like mine use steppers for X & Y with a sort of friction drive, no rack, no screw, just a gear-reduction stepper with a...
The OMAX software and control is fundamentally not Gcode based. The software package does include a Gcode converter, that will take properly structured Gcode from any conventional CAM package and convert it to a toolpath the control can run directly without editing.
This is the fence / inside square on our Maxiem. It's 1/8" aluminum. The slots hold the sliding clamps. One set is laid out on the stock so you can see what's underneath the fence. The slots are angled to follow the pitch of the table slats. Those are the longest full-thread 1/4-20 shcs...
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