I'll start off with a little background information. I work for a display company in North Carolina. We used to order a lot of plastic and hardboard panels for our displays. We decided to save some money and do them in house, so we bought a Shopbot. Since we run production on our machine, the manual valves just weren't cutting it. I decided to add an automated valve open and close system. This was expensive and it's not for everybody. I could justify it because it probably knocked 1 minute off of each cycle. I started off cutting my plenum.
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I cut an 8 zone plenum with a 1/2" border. I sealed the plenum with polyurethane.
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I ordered 1-1/2" Mac Pulse Valves to do the opening and closing.
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I mounted the valves to the bottom of the table with 1-1/2" NPT pipe flanges and PVC. I pointed the valves towards each other but that would later change.
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I ended up turning the valves 90 degrees so the PVC plumbing would fit.
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I ran the piping out of the back and used rubber couplers in case something has to be taken apart. I mounted the bypass valve and gauge on the back also.
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I put a Turck gateway, input and output card in the cabinet to control the valves. We got the drill mounted on the front of the spindle and the control board had two output relays that weren't being used. I modified the post processor to turn on output 7 and I used that in the PLC to open and close the valves.
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I mounted a Turck programmable HMI on the side of the machine so you can put the PLC in Auto, Manual or Off.
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This is a reading while cutting Sintra. Works great and it's so nice not having those manual valves to turn off and on every time.