Wire EDM machine

[Neale]

Nope, if you're looking for a commercial scale, production-quality machine, you're right out of luck in this thread.

Life's a bitch sometimes...

Let's be realistic here. A bunch of amateurs wanted a challenging technical cross-discipline project that was feasible in a home workshop (or three). The team has built a prototype that met and actually exceeds its modest ambitions and design goals. It would scale fairly easily - the mechanical bits are straightforward application of ballscrews and profile rails, cutting and inertia loads are low, and a bigger, heavier machine would be easy. The wire support arm needs beefing up anyway, but that's not rocket science at this level of sophistication. The control electronics and software are not a problem - probably need to move away from the PIC to an Arduino or something like that. SMOP, as I said earlier. The really difficult bits, the spark and motion control electronics, don't really need to scale at all within reason. Could up the spark energy a bit with some bigger capacitors, but my guess is that we could do a reasonable size (for some definition of "reasonable") job with what we have.

My bet is that we could cut things like die blocks for model steam loco valve gears, ratchet wheels and pawls directly into hardened carbon steel rather than cutting first and risking shape change on heat treatment; one suggestion received was cutting combs for musical boxes. So, our toy machine could do a useful job making bits for other toys. Not really in the business of cutting keyways in bevel gears for wind generators or any of the jobs the wire EDM service companies provide. I'm quite interested in the idea of being able to cut profile tools for use in a lathe; although my lathe would take something like 16mm shank tooling, for many purposes something much smaller is perfectly OK and within the scope of this machine. Quick search on AliExpress, wave a credit card, and you could have your own machine delivered with much more capacity and sophistication with a lot less effort.

Happy to discuss what we did and how we did it, if there's any interest, but I'm not putting this forward as "the only way to do it" or even "the best way to do it." Whether our original aims were challenging enough is a separate question but even George Stephenson didn't start out by building Mallard!

Apologies to anyone who thought that this thread was advertising machines for sale, or even a proven design and source of PC boards and components to build one. Mike Bax in the Netherlands is, I believe, working towards doing something like that; the plasmaboog Yahoo group would give more information on that although Mike seems a little reticent to say too much about how his development works for commercial reasons.