Brian Leavitt
05-28-2015, 2:00 PM
I made a big booboo... though I place partial blame on what I feel is a design flaw with the machine. :)
I was engraving some baseballs for a customer. Run one, swap it out, run the next one. Well... on one of the runs I accidentally tapped the joystick as I was pressing the "Start" button. What this did was switch to a different job in the machine - a job which was set to auto focus to .020". Soooo the table starts moving up and I just froze for a second like an idiot. I didn't hit the Emergency Stop button in time and that ball went right up into the lens carriage, damaging the bearings and bending the whole I-Beam (which itself is pretty beefy). I finally whacked the emergency stop, but the damage had been done. After I shut the machine off I tried to get the ball out but it was in there so tight I had to get a hammer and whack it out. I couldn't budge it by hand. Also - the table was thrown out of level when this happened.
Fortunately, Epilog sent me a new I-Beam assembly under warranty. I spent yesterday evening and all of this morning R&R'ing the I-Beam, leveling the table, aligning the beam, checking the scales, and finally resetting the offsets. I just ran the first test piece and everything's back to normal. What a pain, though!
So why do I place partial blame on the design of the machine? Well I'll tell ya - There is a "Crash Bar" attached to the lens. This prevents the table from raising if something hits it. Well this is all fine and dandy, but when the lens carriage is in the home position, the crash bar sits so close to the ruler that any odd shaped objects are going to completely miss the thing.
I was engraving some baseballs for a customer. Run one, swap it out, run the next one. Well... on one of the runs I accidentally tapped the joystick as I was pressing the "Start" button. What this did was switch to a different job in the machine - a job which was set to auto focus to .020". Soooo the table starts moving up and I just froze for a second like an idiot. I didn't hit the Emergency Stop button in time and that ball went right up into the lens carriage, damaging the bearings and bending the whole I-Beam (which itself is pretty beefy). I finally whacked the emergency stop, but the damage had been done. After I shut the machine off I tried to get the ball out but it was in there so tight I had to get a hammer and whack it out. I couldn't budge it by hand. Also - the table was thrown out of level when this happened.
Fortunately, Epilog sent me a new I-Beam assembly under warranty. I spent yesterday evening and all of this morning R&R'ing the I-Beam, leveling the table, aligning the beam, checking the scales, and finally resetting the offsets. I just ran the first test piece and everything's back to normal. What a pain, though!
So why do I place partial blame on the design of the machine? Well I'll tell ya - There is a "Crash Bar" attached to the lens. This prevents the table from raising if something hits it. Well this is all fine and dandy, but when the lens carriage is in the home position, the crash bar sits so close to the ruler that any odd shaped objects are going to completely miss the thing.