well this gadgets been sitting on my shelf for a while it's a it's a Proma torch height
controller compact THC and they is just dirt simple so you know even the idiot electronics
guy like me ought to be able to get it so I have my plasma machine taken apart now so
let's put a couple of leads into this from the negative and positive leads out to the
torch so I figured out for the wiring diagram of this is a hybrid term Hypertherm 1060 m so
I pulled out one of the leads i renze all these white wires our leads going out to
the they're carrying voltage to the tip on the torch the rest of mercantil switches
and things on the torch so I tapped into one of these but a piece of 600 volt wire which
just means you sacrifice where your alligator clips off your bolt the voltage meter and now
we're going to put this thing back together so I know that's going to be safe in there I hope
that's one and the other one is this work lead right up here which actually is the
ground cable ones negative G I think the I think the torch would be positive not sure
according to this the the electrode is negative the ground is a positive lead
another 50 volts in the positives oh yeah they're right the case has a little access door right over
where the power is but I don't want to bring the ground wire down through there because they shield
that real well so I'm going to cut a hole through the little OSS like you keep your consumables
stored in this area so I'm going to cut a hole through there and leave that wire attached there
now this is complete overkill but I got EE Sanderson 30 and connectors it works
our connector all we need you to stay safe in their little gadget wired in and see there's our
wire coming up from the plasma machine and that comes in those two leads come in here on this side
and then I have a sound logic breakout board in here and so I just found you know an unused port
there they had 12 volt DC positive and ground coming off that those are the first two things
you got to feed to this little gadget and then you got to feed it a common and so I have three
input ports here and I took the common off one of them and I ran that down so that has and then the
rest of is just these three switches up down and yeah I see the things on and running and so that's
what those three ports are they correlate to those pins okay well we think we have it working now at
least it gave us a partial oh good test so we're going to call that working this thing is finicky
and it's set for 155 volts which you got to set it what your torch is going to do approximately
and then we're going to run it in a test so you hold down both buttons the cycle through some of
its settings which I have all default they seem good and there's the test it's going to sell it
as the fork is on and then it's going to tell the horse go down which it doesn't do anything if it's
a zero then it's going to tell it to go up and it's going up now once it's got some clearance
it's going to go back down here in a little bit there it goes down now this about here this will
do it on the screen and you can see right here it's at zero and there is coming up and it's
going to go back down now it has a set of zero this is the plasma screen I started off using
the middle screen because I always use milling for plasma cutting because I didn't have torch height
control but you got to use a torch eyes control screen in order to get this little gadget which
is THC min and I had to set mine to zero to get it to come all the way back down to zero because what
it was doing it was going up and wasn't coming back down because that was set at a non-zero value
it'll never go below zero so because we'll never go below zero my trick on the torch over here is
to set the piece of steel in and an upward angle so it's going to pierce it this in and then on
down the table this field gets higher and higher up so it's going to always climb up it's always
going to be certain that it pierces at its lowest spot so let's get into a test let's shut this off
turn it back on and I'll show you a couple of settings on the screen here they have to be in
place - they're under configure pens and ports and you've got to have I tried it without it you got
to have this THC options allow THC up/down control even if not in THC that has to be checked and then
under your your input signals I changed my home switches I turned them all off and I used those
those wires or those ports for input 11 12 and 13 for THC down up and T's torch type control on
and so all that had to be set now I like I said I started off doing this with the mill and not using
the torch right the plasma profile and I found a real easy way to copy from one to the other
I do want to pull my table settings into plasma so what I did is I went over to the the Mach 3
directory on Drive C and I found my profile which I was using which is Mach 3 mill and I just made
a copy of it and I renamed it to plasma and then all you got to do is open it up in an editor and
this is the mils screen so it was exact duplicate except the mill has this 1024 dot set that's the
layout the screen set that we're looking at and so on the plasma and I'll switch over here to
plasma you just change that to plasma dot set and you can you'll look inside your directory
you'll have a plasma dot set file and that's all you do once you plug that in and open it up I'll
send all of your mil settings because there's thousands of them in here are all left the way
they were in your mill but now you've got it set up for your plasma and the Metreon so here we are
now all my mill settings on a plasma screen so I now have access to these but all my speeds and
speeds and motor and direction all that crudd I didn't have to reset it so that's a nice little
shortcut I found I'm glad I found that nothing else has worked very well so here we go we got
words rewind where it got this everything set we're at zero zero zero regen the toolpath just
for good luck the torch looks good the machine is it on over there machine got some green lights
on it so we're going to hit start a cycle and I think I got my speed running about about 75
and it's [ __ ] up okay so it's important because that one messed up too that your
consumables be in good condition because those were getting kind of old and the started wearing
through the nozzle and the voltage goes nuts that it pulls up too high and goes to hell
so you're going to have to have good consumables finding all kinds of gotchas on this night so we
got our steel set up again once again it's going uphill so it will lift as it goes down the sheet
and should come back down it comes this way and then we'll have it all the settings you've seen
so let's just go ahead and bar that cut off I'm going to watch the tht to see what it says to do
let's go up and walk along going into the top
all of 3/4 of an answer taking a turn look at their coming down
now the thing I did with this cut pattern as I move both the peers points to this the end
of the teeth that way is set 0 correctly down yeah I had it too low so I grab the sheet and
pull the whole thing so all those three good chefs that we got it working and we know the
buzz check post Pierce point so that you know the tip is off on the steel on both
beers points and we would have this one so you know pretty good product a lot of hassles but
in the end lot better than having a level out those sheets that we're pleased with it
no glitches in this one huh no glitches in this one you