[APPROVED] New Laguna CNCs for the woodshop!

I’m with Danny on the vacuum table issue. So far I have only used the CNC for cutting larger pieces of aluminum plate than I could do in the machine shop. This requires a lubricant and can’t use the dust collector so I place a temporary spoilboard on top of the permanent one. It may be possible to do that with a vacuum table but it sounds risky. Please don’t create a workflow that doesn’t include metal.

The MDF is 100% still a spoilboard. It sits on top of the vacuum table that is built into the machine. The advantage of this is the spoilboard is now a much easier item to replace. Some people use 2 separate sheets, to extended the MDF life.

Hanna, thats a really interesting right up you linked. I especially like the torque wrench setup.

As with any new machine, there will be learning curves and new procedures to develop. As we bring this machine online, we welcome people to participate in the process.

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Also, if the vacuum table becomes an issue then all we need to do is switch from the more porous LDF (low-density fiberboard) to MDF and revert to traditional hold-down techniques.

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@Hoosier the new machine will have all the same capabilities as the previous one and more. You will be able to cut all the same materials on the new one that you could have cut on the old one.

Any new machine/machine feature will come with some amount of learning/adjusting. There’s a reason we require classes for almost every shop area and machine in the space, and why we’re recertifying all CNC users for the new machine. :blush:

This is absolutely what you do and is super nice and easy. That’s the main benefit of the vacuum, across the surface area of a spoilboard the hold down is as good or better than the nylon nails used currently. You can always add a spoilboard on top of the vacuum. You can see in my picture in the thread I actually have 2 layers on top of the vacuum, a spoilboard with my jig clamped onto it, and the jig holding the workpiece itself. In fact you pretty much should always use added layers of spoilboard unless you are 100% certain you’ll get nowhere close to the vacuum board, such as when surfacing a thick slab. If you are cutting through, you need a spoilboard between your work and the vacuum board

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Just bought a Plotting CNC ISO20 Attachment for our new New Laguna CNC.

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I always find these funny, especially when people use them on 3D printers to “print” pictures.

I have used a “pen” for our current CNC to draft a drawing on vellum so that I could lay it on an existing 90’ IKEA cabinet side panel and verify my CAD design matched it. See Big CNC as a Plotter

I have also seen that some people have drawn bending/fold lines on their sheet metal designs so they could use a brake to bend/fold them into a 3D item This marker will change the way you work with sheet metal.

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I’m really looking forward to the vacuum table. I’ve had issues strongly securing small or odd shaped parts, to the point that I had looked into making a small vacuum holder of my own. This should be a great help.

I assume the vacuum table doubles as the dust collector, so David’s concern about liquid lubricants needs consideration. David, have you tried air cooling? With aluminum, that’s usually sufficient.

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The vacuum table isnt meant to be a dust collector. We will still run an overhead system.

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Only dust collected is what can be sucked through ~1 inch of LDF. So… not much haha

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Vacuum pumps do use quite a bit of power- according to datasheets, I get 244 amps of additional panel capacity for the 5x10 alone (including all the associated loads of that machine).

Our panels are pretty heavily loaded right now, and that is a very large amount. In most real-world use the load is a fraction of the nameplate, but I can’t guess how much.

Do we have a path forward where we can power this? It’s not a matter of how many breaker slots are open- the total panel capacity would be the limiting factor

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@dannym, @Jon has already done a power assessment on requirements vs what we can handle and while a good deal of power is needed it is well within our total panel capacity.

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Yeah, Danny, what datasheets are you looking at? The Laguna manual calls for a 60A 3ø circuit for the vacuum table (which is consistent with two 10hp motors of conventional efficiency) and a 40A 240V circuit for the CNC itself (which seems reasonable for a 3hp spindle motor and a bunch of miscellany). It’s non-trivial for sure, but not crazy for our services.

60A 3ø circuit for the vacuum table (which is consistent with two 10hp motors of conventional efficiency) and a 40A 240V
That would be 60A3+40A2=260 amps of capacity needed.

These are 120VAC legs. A 100A 3ph panel has up to 300A of phase current.
10A 3ø is 10A per leg, 3 legs, 30 amps.

40A 240V “single phase” is 40A capacity on two legs= 80A total

But that’s a wattage load, not amps, and we’re not 240VAC, we’re 208VAC, so 92.3A.

I get a potential 272.3A net total. And that’s just for the Swift, not the other one.

Say we have an entire empty 100A 3ph panel. 60A on W,X, and Y phases. The 40A 240VAC is actually 46A, not 40A, and it’s x2. At this point you’re technically over capacity for the 100A panel to put this on W and X. But you’d have to, nobody’s going to do yet another 100A panel for that. So that pretty much does it for W and X, and Y has 40A left.

There is a difference between nameplate capacity and actual use. Now, the Sawstop is technically rated at 7.5HP=46.6amps total (3 phases, 15.5A per phase). At startup, it briefly draws “a lot”, but just sitting there whirring with no load it’s probably drawing like 2 amps per phase. The 46.6A would only happen if loaded it fully- which would be insane. Like a wide dado through oak and pushing way too fast and actually pushed the motor to its limit.

This depends on the load type. A bandsaw and table saw could go on the same panel even if their max power draw is way over the capacity, because there’s basically zero chance someone will actually load either to the max ever, much less both at the same time. You can be ok loading up a panel with nameplate capacities of certain tools that run well past the panel’s capacity. On the other hand, if you have a shop vac that says it draws 12A, it’s gonna draw 12A at all times it’s on. Add a 3 amps of lights and popping a 15A breaker is guaranteed.

The regen blowers (vac pumps), while rated at 60A *3, I can’t tell what it will actually draw when running normally and what its starting profile does, but I would not be too surprised if they draw most of that 60A * 3 all the time. A 3hp spindle can actually load to 3hp, but you’d have to be an artist to load it just enough but not too much to not cause the VFD to shut down.

The 80V supply for the motors, on the other hand, is moving a gantry vastly heavier than the current CNC. I don’t know what but it will definitely draw high currents when accelerating, which is a lot of the time.

I only have a poor photo of their cabinet interior but it looks like those could be line freq transformers- this may have a power factor well off from unity, in which case we need the panel capacity to account for the real AND imaginary power components- it will draw more amps than the wattage alone comes out to.

The building’s got 3x 200A 3ph = 1800A potentially, if you somehow gamed everything in perfect balance. But our existing panels are sort of near capacity, and I don’t think anyone’s surveyed what phases are being loaded with what actual currents. I do know we really don’t want to blow a mains hard fuse on a phase, as that unbalances all non-VFD motors and can result in significant equipment damage. It also partially energizes the dead leg and that can damage even normal 120VAC appliances. That’s only if one of the mains hard fuses pops though- the mains are also protected by ganged breakers, which, if we’re going to overload something, that should pop and take down all 3 phases together which is far safer.

I don’t have all that data either, but at a glance we’ve been pretty cavalier about total loading, that much is clear. I truly don’t know how close we are to overloading a panel or a service entrance, and to my knowledge no one’s collected that data yet. The T-Flux added a lot of load and it’s concentrated on 2 phases. The vac bed CNC is definitely a massive addition, and also another high current CNC load, plus the fiber laser, that is “significant cause for concern” here.

This is awesome. I can’t wait to use the new machines. :partying_face:

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The Plotting CNC ISO20 Attachment for our new New Laguna CNC was delivered to me today.

It looks to be 3D printed. So in the future we could use this device as a pattern for other special attachments and tooling for the new CNC.

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@bwatt that’s great! That’ll be nice to have one made specifically for the machine to use to make more.

Very excited to see you do more deawing with the CNC. Its inspired me to pursue a couple of ideas.

We’re setting the official transition start date as 9/24/22. This is the day the current CNC will no longer be available for member use so that we can start getting it moved out and do final space preparation to accept delivery of the new machine.

We already received the new small CNC that is replacing the Shark that @JoeN has been hosting. We’ll be working on getting that one set up this weekend so the team helping with curriculum development can start working on the recertification class content as well as the new CNC curriculum that will teach both machines at the same time (yay uniform workflows and unified curriculum!).

We’ll send out an email through Neon to current members as well containing this info and linking to this Discourse post. If you have any questions, please read through the FAQ at the post of this post here.
If your questions aren’t answered there, feel free to reply to this thread with any other questions (only current members are able to reply).

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