Heiz T-1000, early impressions.

**Davem** · 27-04-2010

I am interested in your 'deep plunge' problem. What did it take to stall your 600watt Bosch (albeit into oak) and then stall the axis steppers too? Can I ask what size/type cutter you were using? One wonders if the Kress would stall under such conditions too.
Definitely something you would not want to do a bit deeper and take out the T-slot bed planks - well not at £340 a pop! ( I thought that Heiz were a bit expensive on this component so I checked out alternative suppliers but they were suprisingly close on costs - although they did offer a slightly thicker 20mm deep plank).
Re. wood suppliers. I'm afraid I don't know any but my neighbour is also into deeply curved wooden forms - but of the more regular variety - (he turns bowls!) I'll ask him where he gets his wood from. Incidentally we both have the excellent 12" throat Elektra Beckum (German again) bandsaws for cutting and preparing blanks. Both bought from Bedford Saw who are good for woodworking machinery, blades etc. - but you propbably already know of them.

Bye for now

Davem

**Davem** · 14-05-2010

Pcstru, a couple of weeks ago, you asked about 'decent' timber suppliers. One recommended company is :

DW Mouldings
56-58 Sunderland Road
Sandy
Beds
SG19 1QY www.dwmouldings.co.uk

They do selected hardwoods rather than marine ply - worth ringing their Production Manager - Brian Dawes to see what they have in stock.

My other neighbour (who does wood turning) gets his blanks from :

Bedford Saw and Tool Co
Ampthill Road
Bedford MK42 Tel: 01234 217417

They obviously do square and hex blanks for turning in plain and figured woods but might do other sizes too. Could be worth asking.

Be good to hear how you are getting on.

Davem

**pcstru** · 27-04-2010

Davem, the plunge was with a 1/4in twin flute cutter - the Oak was around 25mm thick with some MDF under it. The cutter went through the oak and into the MDF running at (I think) 3500mm/min before it stalled. It went in at about a 30 deg angle relative to the surface.

**daveshorts** · 28-04-2010

Either that or if one side is pushed while the machine is off

**pcstru** · 29-04-2010

If one side is out of alignment then the machine is going to cut parallelograms rather than squares. So my cunning plan is to cut a square, put in on a good surface and try and measure if it's out and if so by how much. I'll need to scale that up to the length of the axis which should then tell me how much the axis is out. Then I'll need to drive one of the steppers an appropriate number of steps to cure it. Well ... that's my theory! Any comments?

**daveshorts** · 29-04-2010

I guess it depends on how repeatable the error is, and whether there is any spring in the structure. I think that if you are unlucky every time you turn off the steppers you will lose your correction, and it is not obvious to me that applying the same correction next time will be right.

**pcstru** · 15-05-2010

@DaveM - Thanks for coming back with some suppliers - I'll check them out. As it happens though, SWMBO just bought me 10cu ft of rough planked seasoned oak - which should keep me going for some time. I've also found a few suppliers of Marine ply on the net - seems quite expensive but could be worth it for clock gears. My current supply is 'laser' ply from murt.co.uk - cheap as chips but not really suitable for anything but prototypes.

I've done quite a bit of work with the machine but all in wood - no metals yet. Did a house sign for a friend which turned out well. I never know what to charge for these things so said he might like to get me a nice bottle of malt, which he did. I put the vinyl cutter on the machine and tried cutting some vinyl signage. That's a bit fiddly to get just the right pressure but once you get the mark, it seems to work well. Mounting them after cutting is the hard part. Other than that, I've mostly been redesigning and cutting bits of SWMBO's anniversary clock - changing the foliet from a suspended magnetic bearing to a ... well, a kind of pin in a cup thingymabob. Definate improvement in reliability but the asthetic needs some improvement.

The machine itself is standing up to my abuse. Doesn't seem to be 100% (more like 98%) running from my Lenovo laptop but it let's me know before cutting (rather than half way through a job) - and a quick reboot and all seems fine. I think that is some kind of USB issue. Every so often it just gets it's knickers in a twist and I get "realtime module blocked". Sometimes that is my fault for starting up with the HW master switch off. Other times ... I don't know - I'll try swapping in 'real' PC at some point and see how that goes. Will do a more in depth followup in a few weeks - hopefully after I get some metal in there.

**aidank** · 20-05-2010

hi pcstru looks like a good machine, looking at buying a similar machine to that, wondering what type of accuracy is this machine capable of?

also wondering about its cutting capacity, will it cut 6mm wide 0.5mm deep in alumimium, 6mm wide 0.1mm deep in steel?

**pcstru** · 20-05-2010

Hi Aidank. Accuracy - I've not made any measurements yet so can't say with any authority. The Heiz site has specs which quote a repeatability of 0.01mm and resolution of 0.00187 and the manual qualifies that for a temp between 20-25deg C.

I've not tried any metals yet but cutting capacity and accuracy in metals will probably be as much down to the spindle as the machine. The Kress 1050 is OK but as an all in one motor and spindle it's always a compromise. If you mostly need to cut metals to 0.01mm accuracy, then unless you need to machine pieces as large as 1000mm by 580mm, I'd probably look at a CNC milling machine rather than a router. If you do need to do pieces as large as that on a T1000 then you will need to deal with the compromises - stiffen it up and cut at speeds way below the 6000mm/m spec of the machine. You might as well save a bit and get the S1000 (lower speeds won't be an issue) but even then, if metals are your main target and you don't need the large cutting area - you should probably look elsewhere.

**scjb** · 10-07-2010

Hi pcstru. Very interesting thread. Thanks for your observations. It's been a few weeks now and I was wondering how you were getting on?

As an aside, I work with USB peripherals in live entertainment. One annoying thing that laptops tend to do is power down the USB ports as part of the power saving scheme. The first thing we do with show-critical systems is turn off that feature in the Device Manager. I wonder if that could be part of your USB issues?