Oh hey, anyone wanting a nice gradient engraved? Just for fun, try to forget to turn on the cooling pump. WARNING: NOT RECOMMENDED, DO NOT DO IT! (I did it by accident.)
Allow me to go smash my head against the wall now. Yes the tube is still working, but dammit, I just shaved countless hours off of its lifespan. And this despite having two temperature gauges that I KNOW should show a temperature difference of no more than 1.3° between the inlet and outlet. Yet, I never actually looked at them. @*#&^$$%(@!! I should just quit now while I’m ahead, and spend the weekend installing the dumb waterflow sensor and other electronics I’ve been meaning to. Urgh.
ALSO: when something like this happens, don’t go flipping on the cooling right away. That’s like tossing ice cold water on a overheated pan on the stove. Just be calm, turn things off and walk away for a good long time. Let the tube cool down on its own.
I had that happen to me on a long engrave one time and when I glanced at the temp guage it was 35C O.O Fortunately I figured out fairly quickly it was a kinked hose in the bucket from all the ice packs I had shoved in. Finally got me to install my flow sensor.
Out of curiosity, how hot did your setup get @Ashley_M_Kirchner_No ? Hope it is all good & doesn’t give up the ghost anytime in the near future. I’d be kicking myself in your situation.
Well, the bucket was sitting at 5C … I wasn’t about to try and flush that through the tube after just running it for a 9 minute raster job, albeit low power (nothing above 25%), still … I wasn’t about to risk it shocking the glass.
One of the first mods I did was to install a flow switch from light objects. It saved me a couple of times already when I forgot to turn on the pump. Now I put the pump/laser/exhaust fan plugs all on the same surge protector. I use surge protector on/off switch to turn them all on/off.
I’ve had it for a while, just never installed it (because I’m going to add several things all at once). I’m pretty good about that pump except for recently when I changed my flow of operations. Just didn’t pay attention today. In already back to cutting. It’s 40 degrees out and the window that the machine sit next to is open, so it helped cool the tube down once I turned everything off.
Stories like this scare me. I have a bad habit of forgetting stuff, like turning on a pump. I already have plans for a flow sensor to measure the flow rate and combine interlocks using an Arduino. I should probably move this up the list. Hopefully you didn’t loose any tube life. Thanks for sharing.
Probably only shortened it a bit. It’s working fine at the moment. But ya, preventing it from firing with no flow would be a fine mod to do one of these days.
maybe a solution is to put the laser, the exhaust fan, the water pump, and any other critical needs to an extension strip with power switch? so you only turn on one switch and all goes on at the same time?
What I need to do is wire them to the laser cabinet with a light up power switch so I can easily tell what’s on and what’s not. All parts that I have, just haven’t done any of it yet.
Use a temp monitoring system, cheap on Amazon, that has built in temp limits alarm and relay contacts. So that when the water gets to hot the relay trips the interlock. See my blog.
Finally got me to install my flow sensor.