Doug,
I appreciate your posts, as I am in the process of getting my materials together, and as Gerald had mentioned, I read all the construction posts that I can and try and learn as much as I can from everyone! :) I save pictures, hints tips, and everything I can to help me in my build. Hopefully I will be posting my progress in the future and you will have the chance to see my mistakes :eek: and hopefully point me in the right direction as well. Thanks for your pictures and posts. :)

Right guys, you saw how Doug wrote a very useful summary, and you probably also saw a little editing to remove areas that could have caused confusion. My message is; don't be shy to write up your summary of a thread that has been rambling on too long and has taken too many side tracks - these summaries can be tuned and edited to make them 100%.

Doug,

Thanks for the wire info. I'm getting close (before Christmas :)) to ordering the cables and "tracks". Should have pic's of table shortly (3 weeks ?) Just waiting on my rails.

Your posts and information are invaluable.

Greg J,

I strongly recommend that you measure things for yourself on your particular machine. Use a stiff rope in lieu of the cable. I might have made my e chain shorter than yours or I might have routed my cables differently from how you imagine. I sure would hate for you to come up short and it be my fault.

Doug,

Good advice. Will do.

Having a hard time though finding the sheilded multicore wire here though. No one returns phone calls and most only sell to electrical supply companys or people who buy the 500ft rolls. :D

Ed,

I spent a long time trying to find a good deal on shielded cable and ran into the same things you did. If you'll look at my post in the cable thread, you'll find all the information you need to order from my source. Not a great deal compared to what Gerald can get in South Africa but it was the best I could find.

Go to skycraftsurplus.com. They are in Orlando, Florida and will sell you anything wire like (and just about anything else) for pennies. I bought all my shielded cable for around .27 or .32 cents/ft....any length.
They also have a nice selection of Nuetrik XLR's too.
Sean

I will second on the prices of cable. Though I am not building yet, I have checked on the prices and they are going to be close to the numbers that Sean quotes.

My machine took near 200' of 4 conductor wire. I will admit I wasted a little on each run (didn't want to cut it short).

I bought my wire from Doug's source. Good service, allways returned calls/emails, etc. Took 3-1/2 weeks to get.

...and because I built a 5 x 10 table, I used 275' of cable.

Here is another source on the Helukabel cable.

http://www.hitechcontrols.com/cable_index.htm

They order once a week and have a three week turnaround. I spoke to Jim at hitech and explained what I would be using the cable for and he suggested that if a UL label was not necessary then it would be cheaper to use the following type cable.

Ed, it would appear that these cables have a bigger outside diameter - ie. they are "bulkier" and therefore stiffer. Keep an eye on your cable chain radius and the minimum bending radius allowed for the cable.

Thanks Gerald, The pvc coated cable does have a smaller diameter and a smaller bend radius. I will see what he has in the pvc.

Ed, if the difference in price is significant, I would probably use the cheaper, thicker one.....even if it bends a little tighter than spec'ed. In our router application we a putting relatively few bends per minute onto that cable.

I love the fact that the cores are different colors. The cable I used had all black cores with tiny numbers written on them. It was a challenge to read them sometimes. These would be much easier to use.

I have found that prices can vary widely depending where you are from. I had a company up here in Canada, actually in Saskatoon, SK quote me a price of $1500.00 for 263 feet of Olflex 115CY cable.

I checked with another U.S. based source for the Helukable wire which as far as I know has only minor differences with the Olflex, and they quoted me about $500.00 for the same length.

I can't explain it, but price gouging come to mind.

John

Hey Doug, do you have the heukabel part #'s that you used on your cable that you have the prices listed for? I just got an email with prices:eek::eek:
Jim must be pricing something altogether different. The non sheilded prices were about what you have shown. Here is the email:

Ed,
Listed as follows are your pricing for the shielded products that parallel the previous quote.

PN-89960 JZ 602 RC-CY 200 ft. $4.00/ ft.+$25.00 cut charge (200 ft.)
PN-89978 JZ 602 RC-CY 40 ft. $4.33/ ft.+$25.00 cut charge or rest length @ 15mtr.(49 ft.)
PN-49643 SUPERTRONIC-C-PVC 50 ft. $1.41/ ft.+$25.00 cut charge or rest length @ 24mtr. (79 ft,)
PN-49646 SUPERTRONIC-C-PVC 100 ft. $1.59/ ft.+$25.00 cut charge or rest length @ 29mtr. (95 ft.)

Best Regards,


Jim Shiels

Inside Technical Sales



Hi-Tech Controls

14853 E. Hindsdale Ave. Suite D

Centennial, CO 80112 USA



Phone: 303-680-5159 / 800-677-8942

Fax: 303-680-5344

Ed,

I'll try to find them for you. I hunted around for quite a while and I don't think you can beat the prices I got for the small quantities we need. Not in the US anyway.

Okay I found out some more usefull info.

The Helukebel JZ-HF-CY application shows to be for robotics and cable trays. I checked with Dennis Holtgrave at Lappusa and also Jim at Hitech controls. Lappusa was a few pennies less for the 7core but Hitech was less on the 4core 18AWG which I will be needing the most of.

listed earlier in this thread, The Helukebel F-CY-JZ cable application is more twards computer cables and doesn't mention robotics or flexibility(other than bend radius) in the pdf sheet. It does cost about .50 per ft less, but IMHO doesn't sound like the correct cable for what we are building.

I ordered the JZ-HF-CY type cable from hi-tech.

The JZ-602-RC-CY rubber coated 4core 18AGW Helukebel was out of my price range at $4 per ft.

Sorry, my time ran out on editing my last post, but the F AND THE HF are for flexible and highly flexible. So I could be wrong about the F-CY-JZ, it could be okay also. it shows to be a 10x bend.

I would be perfectly happy with the F-CY-JZ cable for our low-speed application.

I am in the process of acquiring parts and ran into some wire issues. I've read the information on this thread from beginning to end several times and I've looked around for "flex" wire with braided shield. There is wire sold here that has both braided and foil shield that is substantially cheaper than import Olflex that is recommended. The only problem is – it’s not advertised as "Flex" wire. If I go with the "Flex" wire, it will cost me about 3X more. My question is can I get away with using this wire instead of "Flex" wire? I'll try to get some pictures of this stuff and post it so you can see what I'm talking about in a day or two when I get a sample of this stuff. The price is $1.60 per meter for 4 core 2.0mm stranded wire (Sorry, only metric specs available here in Taiwan). I would imagine the 1.0 mm per core would be cheaper. Has anyone tried wire that is not officially labeled as "flex" cable for robotics/chain application? I'll still post pictures of the stuff I'm talking about but any suggestions or words of wisdom would be appreciated. Thanks.

I am using a "flexible" but not official flex on my machine. I haven't noticed any issues like cracking or otherwise. I did use an 18ga with a very light PVC jacket that has both the braid and foil. Cheap. .40 / ft. For now, everything working fine after 5 months of hard use.

David, the "flexibility" will mainly be decided by the outside diameter and fine coppercstrands inside. We don't need a lot of wall thickness to protect the cable because we enclose the moving cables in chain. Any thin wall cable with fine strands can be considered flexible enough for our application, which actually is a low grade application by "CNC tool" standards. We are not spitting out 200 widgets per minute.

Lots of people have used unscreened cables and they swear by them. However, when interference problems arise, the first suspect is the cable. Consider that the sheer size of the MechMate makes for very long cables, running closely parallel to each other. The guys going problem-free are mostly hobbyists with smallish tables.

If I was on an absolutely tight budget, I might go for unscreened motor cables, but definitely do good screens on the control circuit.

Thank you Sean and Gerald for the reply. I will post a picture of this stuff tomorrow but it has a black pvc shield that is about 1.2 mm thick. I think the next logical question would be, if there is interference, and assuming it does not originate in the carefully shielded control box, what kind of indicators would one expect to see? Would it be missed steps, eratic motor jerks, etc...?

Yes, missed steps and erratic movement.

The most common complaint seems to be a z-slide that decides to dive into the table, and I suppose that gets the most complaints because it is so dramatic! :)

I have had that happen several times :o. I never knew I could have blamed it on machine error ;). Just joking, mine was 100% operator error ..... but if Gerald had spoke up a little earlier :rolleyes:.

:p ^{<-----sticks out tongue}