Hello

I’m currently building a 4-axis wire EDM here in Finland with 5 friends from our school’s formula student team. We are planning on producing small gears and other parts to our formula car with EDM wire cutting.

The machine we are building has independent moving upper and lower wire guides to cut tapers. Build area is going to be 250mmx250mm. We are otherwise trying to keep it simple and not implementing for example the automatic wire threading function. As of now we are doing some research on different aspects of the whole wire EDM process.

Would it be impossible if some of you would share your knowledge with these areas that are yet not clear to us.



1.Where should the electrical contact point be placed in the wire. Should id be placed as close to wire guides as possible to make the current travel to shortest distance possible? Tungsten carbide is probably sufficient material to used for the contacting. Is the contact usually made with part that just rubs against the wire or should id loop around a tungsten pulley or something similar?

2.How is the lower wire guide threading usually done. Our machine will not have automatic threading. What short of systems these guides use in order for you to be able just to push the wire in the lower guide and it automatically start pulling without you needing to loop it around any pulleys after inserting the wire through lower diamond guide. Our design includes a stepper motor after lower diamond guide for pulling the wire at constant speed and electromagnetic brake before upper guide with closed loop system including force sensor to keep a constant tension in the wire.

3.How should the wire be straightened in the machine? Many wire edm machines have multiple pulleys before going in to the cut is this necessary and is this done for compensation for the wire being spooled tightly in the cartridge

4.With those pulleys being there is there ever a some mechanism to reduce wire vibration or is this just controlled by the wire tension.

5.What diamond guides would be adequate to use in our type of a machine where the table is stationary and upper and lower guide move independently in XY directions. I understand most CNC wire edm machines have the ability to cut taper so would it be a good plan to just buy diamond guides from those machines as a spare parts and use them.

6.If noticed most flush cups are blowing water out from top and bottom. Is this done so debris wouldn’t travel to the lower diamond guide. I thought it would make sense to suck the dirty water from under the cut so that small particles wouldn’t go floating around the tank and also with the wire traveling downward you could think it would be better not to crash those two water flows but to keep it unidirectional by creating suction underneath the part.

7.Lastly would normal stainless steel be good material for the table and parts inside the tank.


Thank you in advance

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