MaintenanceSophia

Maintenance Sophia

Cleaning

There are three mirrors to clean outside the focusing head, and one mirror and a lens on the focusing head.

Pour a bit of alcohol into the cap, then dip the cotton bud into it (doesn't need to be very wet) and wipe (not particularly hard) the mirrors to clean them.

For the focusing head, loosen the screw on top, turn the retaining clip round and tighten the screw up again when it's out of the way. With a blob of blu-tak, remove the mirror and clean it, then replace it and fasten it in with the retaining clip

Removing the lens: Loosen the screw holding on the air nozzle, and carefully remove that. Then unscrew the lens holder - if the lens doesn't come away with it, remove the mirror and gently push the lens down from above with a cotton bud. Clean with a cotton bud and alcohol

To clean the bed, remove it and soak overnight in Oxy Clean (the powder cleaner that comes in an blue(?) bottle)

Adjusting

Optics

• You shouldn't need to adjust the tube mirror ever.
• If you're having problems where it cuts fine to the left-hand side, but not the right, it's more likely to be the second mirror.
• The third mirror (the moving one) is just to reflect the beam 90 degrees over to the final mirror, so getting the beam into the centre isn't essential - just needs to be in the same place at either end of its travel.
• If the cutting problems are front to back, then it's the third, moving mirror that needs adjusting.
• Test on perspex as it's a much more stable material. 6-8 speed should cut 3mm
• If adjusting focus (as it can affect things at times), only need to change by 1mm or so either side

Levelling the Bed

If the four screw threads which raise and lower the bed get out of sync then it's possible for the bed to end up skew and jammed. The best way (found so far) to fix it is to use the callipers to measure the heights of the bed at each screw thread in order to work out which one(s) need adjusting, and then using pliers (gripping the top cm of the thread as that isn't used in general operation) to either stall three of the threads while adjusting the "main" thread, or multiple sets of pliers to stall relevant threads while adjusting other threads manually with the pliers.

Configuration

Config is set in the laser cutter software: File → Bed Settings. However, to pass those changes through to the laser cutter it's self (i.e. to set auto-datum on/off) you need to download any revised configuration to the cutter motherboard by using [DownLoad] → [Download CFG].