@langmuir-sam is it normal for the ram to hit a hard bottom before being stopped by some kind of soft limit?
My press hits the end of the cylinder stroke just short of the full 4 inches of advertised stroke length. Its not by much, less than 0.050" shy… Is this normal? Is there any way to set / adjust a lower soft limit to prevent hitting the cylinder bottoming out? Its one thing to home against the upper hard stop with a significantly reduced tonnage limit but hitting the end of travel on the other end potentially with the full 12.5 tons of available force isn’t ideal.
Similarly, I’ve noticed that the back gauge doesn’t seem to have travel soft limits, so you can run it all the way to where it physically hits the hard end of travel. Once homed, soft limits should be enabled to prevent this.
Thanks!
Yes that is normal. There is no soft limit on the bottom since the bottom position will change slightly per unit and in normal operation there is never a reason to go as low as 4" - even our shortest punches and dies only used together only need ~3" of movement to bottom out. That is a good suggestion for a software improvement though. I’ll add it to the doc.
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Got it. Thanks Sam. I’ll plead a case for this as a future enhancement… I do think it would still be a good idea to put in a ram (and other) soft limit(s). Regarding the ram, this press brake uses standard size tooling and someone might want to make a lower profile die to gain the absolute maximum amount of clearance on the top side. Better to just set a soft limit on the ram depth than have it actually bottom out a cylinder. Hopefully that makes sense and is something that can be considered.
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