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Vertical wire alignment process

nlancaster

Aluminum
Joined
Oct 8, 2018
So, I was perusing this old thread - https://www.practicalmachinist.com/...tips-tricks-294512/index2.html?highlight=tips

And came across the below process to vertically align the wire after changing guides.

I have used it a few times and it works damn good, but I have been using the rule of thumb adjustment in the below quote.

My trignometry is pretty bad, does anyone know the actual formula to figure the adjustments out? Assume a Z change of +8.0.

Another method for squaring up a head. We essentially stole the Charmilles method of the auto squaring procedure, but just do it manually. We made a block, (any of you with Charmilles, at least older ones, will probably recognize it) .75" wide by 3" long, with a little "loop" made out of some carbide, about 1/16" thick, screwed onto the end of it. You simply pick up the center of this loop with the wire at, say, Z 1", then bring the head up 6 or 8 inches and pick it up again. If the wire is vertical the pickup will repeat, if it's off the angle changes and you get a different center. If it's off, you can either just trig out how much to shift the U and V, or just do what we do, shift the U or V double the amount the X or Y is showing to be off, it's generally close enough to get it on one shot as long as the head isn't out a mile. We've adopted this method on all our machines, Sodick, Fanuc, Charmilles, Mits, Chmer, and it works great on all of them.

The block is about 3/4" thick. It really doesn't matter much though, the important part is getting a good Z distance between the two pickups to establish your trig triangle, if that makes any sense. Attached a picture of said tool.

JDmMcNC.jpg
 
Makes perfect sense,
Although if you run a charmilles it’s far easier just to run the guide setup cycle 👍🏼
 
I run two Sodick AG600L, our vertical alignment process per the book,

1. place alignment block,
2. vertically align alignment block with indicator
3. horrizontally align alignment block with indicator
4. run X or Y axis alignment
5. repeat above steps for the other X or Y Axis

fun times.
 
I run two Sodick AG600L, our vertical alignment process per the book,

1. place alignment block,
2. vertically align alignment block with indicator
3. horrizontally align alignment block with indicator
4. run X or Y axis alignment
5. repeat above steps for the other X or Y Axis

fun times.

nlancaster
Hey forget the indicating of the alignment block and just use a square when you put the block on the table or just align to the part it self. Do you align the U and V once a day? Or do you align for each job you cut?
 
jz814, generally we only align when changing wire guides. Our machines have not showing any indications of alignment drifting with use. we do change wire guides on one machine every other week or so when we change wire size, and one machine we probably change wire size a couple of times a week.

We tried using a square and we were not getting true vertical alignment.

Mike1974, accidental UV moves don't happen, our control dongle has a UV enable button. UV only ever get used for UV threading position adjustment. And you can just G54UV to get back to UV zero if needed.
 
just a big rectangular block, apparently all sodick sends with thier machines for wire alignment.

So that is why we are building the one I posting in the first post in this thread. Works great, been using one of our fixtures that has similar features, but that fixture maybe in use someday when I need to align the wire on the other machine.
 
So we got the posted alignment test rings made for each machine. And using G83 and several variables I have also now built a gcode file we can run to align the wire vertically automatically. So much better then having to place the block, get it aligned, align the X-axis directs, and repeat for Y-axis.
 








 
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