I had a good idea that mounting a pair of bright beam type LED's on the gantry and pointing them at the tip of the bit would work well on thinner foam. I was correct imo. The light splits into two as the bit goes up of course but that doesn't bother me at the least. If I take the gantry out again I'll lower the LED's to where the beam just misses the Dremel body.

The full row of white LED's mounted on the plexi lid makes for perfect viewing of whats going on.

I've got a few more mods to take pics of and add to the thread later. I'll do better at the youtube vid, promise This was shot with a phone.

Attached files

 

Nice job! I have to say I like it having the double light for some reason, I just like the way it looks. I wonder if you added even more lights around it and did a 3d carving, would it look like a lithophane? It would be an interesting experiment.
Really great work I like this mod, thank you for sharing it.
Mark and Trish
BTW did you get any pics of how you set it up?

 

Thanks, Denis, It was a mod I had to do. I've messed up more starts by not getting that bit at the correct stop than I care to recall. I knew the focused blue beam LED's were blindingly bright when looked at directly. $8 and few weeks later DealExtreem sends me 20 of the things. On 12V they have no trouble with fff at 2' distance.

Mark,
I did take pics but in the change from one hard drive to another I lost most all of them. So much for Western Digital's above average MTBF rate I only had 18k hours on the drive. So I'll Sketchup the way it is soon.

 

That would be great if you could use that 66 its such a pain to reformat.
Wish you good luck with it and that it works out.
Mark and Trish

 

Had a friend over that can use a camera with a fair amount of competence, so I had him click a few of the gantry led mod. Along with an adjustable fence setup and a wheeled table to hold the machine. In the table I've added a few extras just because it's to hot to fly and Kirt and I just like to tinker.

BTW. Solved the hard drive issue. I had recently installed an old via6421 sata controller card and didn't know it had issues with TB size drives using sata2, which basically toasted all the drives data. I retrieved most of my data by luck. So I got a modern card and now run raid 1 on storage and bought a nice 10k rpm drive for the OS which i image to a regular drive for backup, Had to do a 4x-945 cpu to move things along also Works so nice and quick I haven't bogged it yet Attached files

 

Ok Tbird you and your friend Kirt definitely ROCK! This is unreal and such a cool and in depth project.
I can't wait to see it completed! Great job to you both. Thank you for sharing this with us
Mark and Trish

 

Nice mods Tbird!
I like your table. I still need to make a nice table for mine.

 

Eagle http://www.cadsoft.de/freeware.htm

There are a series of tutorials on youtube that are required viewing for the first time user. The software is not very intuitive. But if you've got some pcb design knowledge it all falls in place fast. It can also do the cnc files for a variety of machines, none of which I was familiar with. (to bad )

After a quick layout of the circuit and board I chose to make a jpg screenshot of the board and imported it into Sketchup. Then mocked the traces and offset those for the bit path line using the fold tool. Same bit does the plunge for the holes, cut the outline and tab then a little cleanup and its done. Took about an hour concept to finish, pretty cool.