Just got tired of waiting for the air assist nozzle to come. I thought why don’t I use a few rubberbands and a spring to use the damn thing allready. Has anybody else done this?
I got this machine a two weeks ago from aliexpress and still tinkering with it. Put in a led strip for lighting, bought a 30×20cm honeycomb bed, which in my oppinion is a bit too small and ordered parts for air assist. When I got it the fume extraction propeller thingy was faulty, so I bought a new one, cut down the vent inside a few cm, but everything else was quite well made. That was surprising for me to be honest, because I paid 350€ for it (with shipping, shipped in 6 days to eastern europe) and the despute for the extractor thingy is still processed (I was surprised that ali suggested 102€ back for that plastic crap, the seller hasn’t responded yet so I don’t have high hopes for the suggested 100)
I did something like that when I first started cutting with my stock machine and it worked somewhat. Did not last because the coil-y cord and wire to my led finder kept binding the gantry and the air beam was not stable on the cut.
A more focused air stream and stable gantry connection (drag chain) helped my cutting quality and reliability immensely.
I actually did some massive testing on this, there is a lot of advantages throwing away the nozzle.
You can optimize it a bit more with a thin nozzle for pumping foot balls and similar, will speed up the flow a bit.
When it comes to air assist, its not more important how the air get to the cut, than how much air you throw at it.
I wrote some more about it here. As a side note, my tests showed almost identical results between a nozzle and a pipe. The assist nozzle brings a lot of problems with it though.
