I'm building a fabric cutting machine which has a 16 foot long X axis. Originally I was going to do what everyone else seems to be doing in the fabric cutting industry and hanging the control wires off to the side so that they form loops that slide along a tight steel cable. I had zero luck getting this to work however and really don't see how they are doing this in the trade. There are four motor cables, a valve control cable, an AC cord, an air hose and three limit switch lines that have to hook into the gantry, and my tests using just a single motor cable resulted in the cable getting bunched up, twisting around itself and adding lots of resistance to the gantry. Some setups string the cable overhead instead of along side the table, but I can't see that working any better and just looks ugly.
So the trick is how to get a nine foot length of drag chain to work over that large of a distance. The problem you run into is that the chain will sag under its own weight once you get beyond about a four foot span on the upper portion. What I did was use a split shelf so that a higher shelf supports the cable on the top side once it goes beyond the mid point of the table. This seems to be working pretty good and looks a hell of a lot better than the hanging cable did (and was easier to install while using only half as much cable). There's a bit of friction once the entire chain is dragging on the upper shelf, but I think surfacing the top shelf with a low friction surface such as Formica should reduce the drag.
Just throwing this out there in case anyone ever runs into the same problem on long cable runs.
So the trick is how to get a nine foot length of drag chain to work over that large of a distance. The problem you run into is that the chain will sag under its own weight once you get beyond about a four foot span on the upper portion. What I did was use a split shelf so that a higher shelf supports the cable on the top side once it goes beyond the mid point of the table. This seems to be working pretty good and looks a hell of a lot better than the hanging cable did (and was easier to install while using only half as much cable). There's a bit of friction once the entire chain is dragging on the upper shelf, but I think surfacing the top shelf with a low friction surface such as Formica should reduce the drag.
Just throwing this out there in case anyone ever runs into the same problem on long cable runs.