In the last 9 months I constructed my own wire EDM machine from mostly discarded materials. A year ago, I built a sinking EDM. The power supply was built with directions from a book witten by Robert Langlois "Build an EDM". I thought going from a sinking EDM to a wire EDM would be easy since I had a power supply.
Well, the wire EDM was a bigger challenge than first thought but I got it working. The X/Y axis are powered by DC gearmotors, also homemade. The feed screw is 1/2-20 threaded rod. In part of the gear reduction I installed an encoder which was a gear with 50 eq sp holes. The space between each hole was .001" of travel. I then used fiber optics to site through the holes and send counts to an Allen-Bradey PLC. So, to move .250", counters were preset to 250 counts. The PLC determines which gearmotor is forward, stop, reverse. Only rectangular holes can be made, but it works.
Hope the pics print
Jim
