Upgrading Motor speeds

[Jonathan Bowen]

How much of a pain is it to upgrade your gantry speeds? I switched to a 60 watt tube recently and it been a good boost to speed but etching is still taking forever. Motor speeds are 400mm/s right now on my Hurricane Agnes (Gweike). Take over an hour to etched a production file that covers most of the table. It's also REALLY annoying that I can't etch to the edge of the table. So I've been thinking of ways to expand it. I'm stuck on how to move the switch for home and still allow the gantry to shift past that point on an etch. It's got about an inch of play on either end of the table as the motor reverses direction. I don't want to decrease my DPI anymore. Is it worth it to try and upgrade this or should I just deal with it for a while longer while I save up for a newer higher quality laser?

[matthew knott]

I would think it would think changing to motors that will run faster is a massive job, your machine will have 3 phase stepper motors and the Chinese are pretty good at running them as fast as they can go, why not use 600mm/s as that seems to be the maximum most people on here use.
No machine will etch fully edge to edge, they need an acceleration/deceleration area, you might be able to get a bit more out of it by adjusting the marking area in the software and you can normally adjust the amount of overrun also but how much extra area you get and then possible down sides is all debatable. We needed a 1.2m x .9m but purchased a 2m x 1.5m so we had plenty of head room !

[Jonathan Bowen]

Well hurricane has them set as 400mm/s max. I can research that a bit and see if it can go faster without slipping. There is enough room on the gantry to make it work for the entire table but I'll need to expand the rail and get a new belt. I'd also need to work out a new limit switch setup. One that will allow it to pass over it and come back without causing problems. There is also a setting they fiddled with in one of the updates that stops it when it hits the limit and I need to find out how to reverse that.

[Kev Williams]

My Triumph was factory set for 500mm/s but that can be changed in the software. I'm using PHCad, which is (I believe) a version of Laserworks. (Someone posted a screenshot of Laserworks and it's the same). To change mine, opened up the machine parameters, found the max X-axis speed and simply changed it to 700 from 500, and hit "save parameters".

I just posted a thread on 'overdriving' the machine past the factory set limits, I got warned of stepper motor skipping. Someone mentioned theirs skips at 1000 mm/s, another mentioned no skipping at 800. I've ran several jobs at 700 with no problems at all- when things slow down I'm going to experiment with faster speeds--