Ken Smith
01-09-2009, 3:40 PM
I've been working out of my garage with my ULS-V460. I had been doing some engraving earlier in the day and I had my laptop hooked to my laser. At one point I got careless, preoccupied, or whatever, and I tripped over my connected printer cable while I was carrying some remnant pieces of museum glass....
The glass broke, the cable yanked my Thinkpad off the table and shattered the LCD screen, and the jolt knocked by V460 out of alignment on the X axis.
Okay, I didn't care about the glass. The pieces were scrap, and I was on my way over to the garbage can when I tripped. The laptop was destroyed, and not worth fixing. I did salvage the RAM, and drives though.
The worst part was the laser alignment.
Adjusting the X axis is easy, IF you know what you are doing. I obviously didn't. I didn't see anything in the V460 manual, and my laser is out of warranty, so I figured that I would give the old college try. I looked at the gantry and decided that I would try moving the Y axis arms. They look like they are designed for small adjustments.....BAD MOVE....don't do this! They are calibrated at the factory in Arizona, and should not be moved.
All I really need to do was to simply loosen the coupler/anti-backlash nut on the drive shaft and make sure both sides of the x-axis were hitting the front alignment pins prior to re-tightening. Doh!
After a lot of patience, I was able to get everything "close enough" again, and its working well. Just knowing that its slightly out of whack, really drives me nuts though. I see a trip to Scottsdale in my future.
I ended up picking up a new laptop for cheap. Luckily a local pawn shop had another T30. I was able to just plug my hard drive and was back in business.
Ken
The glass broke, the cable yanked my Thinkpad off the table and shattered the LCD screen, and the jolt knocked by V460 out of alignment on the X axis.
Okay, I didn't care about the glass. The pieces were scrap, and I was on my way over to the garbage can when I tripped. The laptop was destroyed, and not worth fixing. I did salvage the RAM, and drives though.
The worst part was the laser alignment.
Adjusting the X axis is easy, IF you know what you are doing. I obviously didn't. I didn't see anything in the V460 manual, and my laser is out of warranty, so I figured that I would give the old college try. I looked at the gantry and decided that I would try moving the Y axis arms. They look like they are designed for small adjustments.....BAD MOVE....don't do this! They are calibrated at the factory in Arizona, and should not be moved.
All I really need to do was to simply loosen the coupler/anti-backlash nut on the drive shaft and make sure both sides of the x-axis were hitting the front alignment pins prior to re-tightening. Doh!
After a lot of patience, I was able to get everything "close enough" again, and its working well. Just knowing that its slightly out of whack, really drives me nuts though. I see a trip to Scottsdale in my future.
I ended up picking up a new laptop for cheap. Luckily a local pawn shop had another T30. I was able to just plug my hard drive and was back in business.
Ken