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View Full Version : Finally adjusted my scales, tired of missing center on a part!



Brian Lamb
10-19-2017, 6:50 PM
I know I had asked a long time back on how to get the engraving where it was supposed to be in relation to the 0,0 corner, upper left on my ULS machine. So... I took a brush and the last drops of my Cermark and put a few dabs on the table itself, then engraved a few segments of lines at X 1.0 and Y-1.0. Wiped up and had some nice precise lines and using a 123 block (I'm a retired machinist and we use these a lot) loosened my scales and moved things to be in line with the engraved marks as best possible.

Locked everything down and then engraved a 1" x 1" square with the upper left corner at X1.0 Y-1.0 and then checked with calipers to see if the box was really 1" and 2" away from the two edges. Near as I can tell I'm within about .005" now, Y was off .060" and X about .010 prior to this.

Should make it easier to hit position and result in less trial and error.

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Kev Williams
10-20-2017, 1:46 PM
My old ULS had a re-zero function, well 2 actually, 1 was a 'day use' thing, where you could offset the top left corner down and in to make the corner to 'my' 0/0, however, for this to work, the scales had to be too far up and too far left, because entering negative numbers wasn't allowed. And once the machine rebooted, you'd have to enter the change again. The OTHER issue with this is rarely an issue but did come up once or twice, is that by adjusting the 0/0, you lose that much table space. When it became a problem was when cutting at the 18" and 12" extremes; if I had X adjusted .035, then the max actual X distance was 17.965 instead of 18...

The second zero function worked, but the button-push procedure to find it was a bad as some of the GCC things ( ;) ), and having no manual I was only able to find the setting menu by accident. So what I did about every 6 months was to put down some tape, and have the machine cut it at .98 from its 0/0 left and top, remove the scale-side tape, then put my exactly 1" wide steel ruler against the cut tape, then move the scales against the ruler and tighten them down. This accomplished 2 things, it put the scales exactly .020" above and left of zero so i could adjust from there if I wanted; and the scales were perfectly aligned square/vertical/horizontal to the machine, so everything placed against them would be engraved perfectly, no uphill/skewed words or cut lines...

My LS900 and GCC have boot-up-while-pressing-enter menus that come up for 0/0 adjustment. Just do a test engraving, measure the diff between where it is and where it should be, then change it in the menu, makes it easy :)

Brian Lamb
10-20-2017, 2:21 PM
My ULS has the same features... but you can't move past Y0 (at least not that I have found) and in my case my Y ruler was about .060" or more above Y0. So getting the rulers to jive with the home position of Y0 and X0 for that matter, needed to be done by moving the rulers. If my rulers had been X plus and Y minus, I could have just rest the 0,0 position and maybe lost a little of my 18" or 32" working area, that would have been easier.

Now if I want to start on a corner of a part sitting in the middle of the table, I can jog over there using the laser pointer and reset zero for the job. I wanted the machine's ruler and software to agree on where the 0,0 position was. I do a lot of repetitive parts and using fixtures, I wanted to be sure my upper left placement was at 0,0 as best I could get.