It is not indicated on the website but what is the max hypothetical feed rate I could use? Say cutting machineable wax I would like to feed as fast as possible, what feed can NM-135 put out? Also what happens if I indicate more feed in my code than machine is capable of?

zaebis,

I'm not exactly sure what the maximum feed rate could be. I'm guessing now, but it looks like it is configured in Mach3 to do about 40 to 60 inches per minute rapid. As for the fastest possible fee rate? I'm sure you could configure it to go a lot faster but, this can get tricky. It depends on many variables and would take a rather long list of questions.

I haven't messed with the feed rates on mine yet because the defaults are more than enough for what I am machining. I'm sure there are some on this forum that have tweaked their feed rates that could chime in.

-Greg

zaebis,

I'm not exactly sure what the maximum feed rate could be. I'm guessing now, but it looks like it is configured in Mach3 to do about 40 to 60 inches per minute rapid. As for the fastest possible fee rate? I'm sure you could configure it to go a lot faster but, this can get tricky. It depends on many variables and would take a rather long list of questions.

I haven't messed with the feed rates on mine yet because the defaults are more than enough for what I am machining. I'm sure there are some on this forum that have tweaked their feed rates that could chime in.

-Greg

Ok cool. Still waiting for mine to arrive to play with it myself. I have a few project-prototypes that have to be machinned out of wax (machinneable wax that is) which can be fed 200+ IPM. Too slow a feed may cause it to melt unless I bring the spindle down to a crawl. I will have to imperically find out the best settings I guess.

How does your machine behave at 60 IPM with frequent changes of direction with respect to column flex?

Ok cool. Still waiting for mine to arrive to play with it myself. I have a few project-prototypes that have to be machinned out of wax (machinneable wax that is) which can be fed 200+ IPM. Too slow a feed may cause it to melt unless I bring the spindle down to a crawl. I will have to imperically find out the best settings I guess.

How does your machine behave at 60 IPM with frequent changes of direction with respect to column flex?

the nm135 rev 2.1 is set by default to 75ipm. in theory you can play with motor tuning in mach3 to make it run faster. just dont "expect" it to be faster.

with more powerful motors 200ipm is doable, but at that point you may or may not be putting excessive wear on the machine ways. i know ive seen sieg x3 based machines doing 160ipm on this forum, so it is theoretically possible. ive gotton my nm-070 to do 150ipm but i leave it at 100ipm for better acceleration.

You'll have no trouble with wax or foam or even open grain wood with these machines because your loads will be pretty consistent. The motors are mainly dealing with the loads of the head and table, but if you are pushing it hard into harder material things change fast.

There are a lot of tweaks you can do to the motors true, but there are lots of things you can do to make the machine more rigid for doing deeper cuts and faster feed rates,,, to a point. Then the machine just starts singing to you. I don't mean opera though. It's called resonance and it usually happens in the areas where there's slop or looseness. Adjustment, trial and error play a big roll in the process and each machine is different.

If you are use to taking big fast cuts on a larger machine, don't expect to do it on a machine that's 1/3 the size. If your use to taking small cuts on a smaller machine, don't expect to see huge improvements without a fair amount of tweaking and experimenting with feeds and speeds. The machine will tell you (loud and clear) when it's at it's limits of performance.

-Greg

I'm currently running 60ipm rapids, with no problem. I've tried the max allowable (which is limited by the 25,000Hz MACH3 setting for the PC's parallel port) of 118IPM, and it seems to work, but I plan to thoroughly test it (where testing involves zeroing, then rapiding the table everywhere for a few minutes, then checking zero again).

Your column flex is much more a function of acceleration rather that IPM. Once I had the accel set to near-infinite, and Z starts and stops would shake the floor.

For a week now I've been running X,Y=100ipm with accel="10", and Z=60ipm with accel="7" - so far so good. Z can't handle 75ipm - every once in a while the head would get stuck (stepper buzzing, but no movement).