Finally! Home Switches!

[SCzEngrgGroup]

Believe it or not, aside from the first few days after it arrived, I've had only a Z Home switch on my Torus Pro. The original inductive home/limit switches were unreliable, as chips would pile up on them, causing false triggers (Novakon has long since completely re-designed and vastly improved them, so they now work well). Anyway, I simply removed the X and Y switches a few days after I received the machine. All this time (about 4 years), I've had only the Z switch. Yesterday, I finally got off my lazy butt and installed some new switches, which was incredibly simple. I used the square inductive switches widely available on E-Bay for next to nothing. Mounting could not have been simpler. The Y switch is mounted to the bellows support bracket on the front of the base casting. This required nothing more than notching the bracket, and drilling and tapping a few holes. I mounted the switch on a small piece of aluminum angle, to provide a greater range of adjustment, but if I were to do it over, I'd just leave out the angle, and simply mount the witch directly to the bracket with two #4-40 screws, as I did with the X axis switch. The X switch is mounted directly to the right rear end of the table with two #4040 screws, under the motor cover. Both locations are completely protected against chips, so no worries about false triggers. Both trigger when the the axis moves far enough for the ways to extend over the switches, and both set Home at the extreme end of axis travel. They work perfectly, providing homing that is repeatable to within the axis backlash (about 0.0005"), which is MORE than good enough for my purposes.





Regards,
Ray L.

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[LeeWay]

Looks good, Ray.
I had to replace my last orange wire on my limit switches today on the Pulsar. I recently bought the newer style black wires from Novakon, so had them on hand. Those orange ones were the ones that had the LED's inside them. John mentioned that they did have trouble with those but the black were much better.

[SCzEngrgGroup]

Well, I'm a happy camper! I did more testing, to verify the repeatability, and saw more variation than I expected. I dug into my homing and probing software, and made some improvements, and the performance is now better than I would have though possible! I can now home the machine, then use probing to set my fixture offsets, with a total variation of less than +/-0.0002", as verified using a tenth-reading indicator! As a final test, I put a piece of scrap in the vise, homed, probed the fixture offsets, mounted the piece of scrap using my vise-stop to locate it, moved to X0.75 Y-0.75, then drilled a 1/4" hole. I then removed the stock, re-homed, re-probed, re-mounted the piece of scrap, moved to X0.75 Y-0.75, and the drill dropped right into the hole silently!

Regards,
Ray L.