Morning folks, and happy weekend! My Nomad Pro seems to have the room to cut an extra inch or so in Y. Is this possible (given adequate project support of course)? Some setting in grbl–$130 or something? Thanks.
You can clamp taller stock, the problem is getting more than 3" of working area is difficult due to the limits of the tool length (can’t be more than a certain length, but needs to be long to make the cut).
Ah–I’m not thinking taller (Z), I’m thinking deeper (Y).
I ran mine to the mechanical limits for all axes a few months ago. As I recall, the Y travel mechanical limited at about 215mm, and X was about 235mm, but don’t trust numbers from my memory. Check it yourself or wait until the cat wakes up so I can get up, and I’ll go take a look at my settings.
The machine came without soft limits enabled, so I set the values and enabled it ($20 controls soft limits, #130-$132 are the limit values). I set the limit values to a few mm less than mechanical travel to provide protection against things like missed steps.
The jog for CM limits before the mechanical limit on all axes by a pretty good margin.
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Probably not as convenient, but if you must must have lots of extra Y, I have done jobs where I cut the gcode into two parts and rotated the X and Y axis around for each part. You then run the first job with the excess stock hanging off the front of the Nomad, unclamp and rotate the stock 180 degrees on the table with the machined part now hanging off the front, rezero and run the second job. Extra time and pain certainly but should get you up to 400mm of Y.
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Cat woke up, so I powered up the machine to look at the soft limits…
The measured travel to mechanical limit from the home position (home is -5mm absolute for all axes from the factory, and, like most all CNC machines, travel is in the negative direction from home) x: 232 mm from home to limit (end of travel is -237 absoluan), y: 213mm from home (-218 absolute), and z: 98mm from home (-102mm absolute). I think that I allowed 1 or two mm in these numbers before the physical limit, but I wouldn’t try it.
This is about 8-3/8" on the Y axis, 9-1/8" on the X, and 3-3/4" on the Z, from the home position. You have 5mm more on between logical home and the limit switch. I wouldn’t use the last 5mm at either end, in practice.
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Thats a great idea for future projects. What I’m thinking now though is that I’m about to try making a sort-of vice that hangs over the ends of the table so that I can put full 8" blanks in for multisided milling.
Awesome @enl_public! Thanks so much for checking. So these values (or whatever less I might choose) go into $130, $131,and $132, right? And set $20 = 1 to enable thes $130-132?soft limits, yah? Then the nomad will be able to go there if need be? Thanks!!
With those measurements that’s almost 20% more usable area…
That’s a great idea. Be sure to share if you make that!
The machine will go there, but I am not sure if the C3D software allows it. I don’t use CC, and CM won’t jog that far. I haven’t tried using CM to send Gcode that goes outside 200mm, so I don’t know if it catches the 200mm bound. I have hand sent Gcode to edge parts that far out a few times. Handy when I want to get the most out of a chunk of material… rather than build a Gcode file and diddle with machine position to get the perfect cleanup, just watch it and send the commands by hand. Then set origin based on the clean up cut.
Keep in mind that these limits may be different on your machine based on the exact position of homing switches and manufacturing tolerances, and that these are where the spindle center can go, so the work envelope is less. I think the widest I have gone in a job run on the X axis is maybe 220 for the spindle center, 215mm for the part.
Thanks again. Hadn’t considered that although I could jog the machine there maybe CM wouldn’t go there. Well, I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks how it goes. Thanks everybody!