[Cold Fusion]

Took 6 hours, but now it's finally been moved into the garage by rollers. The uphill slope combined with my lack of experience handling 3 ton pieces of machinery were all working against me, but at least it's there and I still have all my fingers.

[Cold Fusion]

Today I worked on the lube system as well as the Z axis on the knee. The old auto-oiler got hit with a forklift so I'll be buying a new Bijur manual one shot. This probably isn't as good of a solution as an automatic model, but it's the only thing I can afford right now.

The Z axis ballscrew in the knee had every single bolt loose where the nut connected to the casting. I was worried that it had an extreme amount of backlash until I cranked the whole thing up and got a look at that nut. The rubber bellow protecting the screw is a lost cause, but hopefully the seal to the air-piston counterbalance faired a little better.


In 2 weeks I'll have my 100amp sub panel installed at the garage. Recently our breaker box almost caught on fire so we had the whole unit replaced. When the electrician was here fixing it, I talked to him about the 220v options for the garage. We came to the conclusion that a subpanel would be best, that way we can install a couple more 110v lines to other things in the garage.



This evening I tore off all the old limit switches and worked on cleaning them out. The ball mechanism was plugged up with all sorts of gunk and the rubber seal was degraded to the point where it was causing the plunger to bind. I also rewired all of them to work through my parallel port breakout board. The old cable was probably 14ga and much too big to work.

[Cold Fusion]

Got my geckos today, as well as a metal enclosure for all my electronics and a computer. Hopefully by tomorrow it'll all be wired up.

(Dang those Gecko drives are tiny compared to my Centents).

[Cold Fusion]

Got my 500w X axis servo today! A bit of bads news though. It produces its rated .6HP at 3000rpms, not 1500 as I originally thought. My target speed for the X motor was 1250. This means I'm going to have to gear it down a bit, which is going to kill the speed with my 1000ppr encoder. I should switch it out for a 250ppr but since the 1000ppr came free with the motor, I'll have to live with it for now.

I spent the afternoon making some temporary cables and getting everything ready to be tested on a single axis. About 2 hours later, success! The motor spun up quite nicely, although my 400mhz computer is obviously limiting the speed. Now to fiddle with the tuning. It never seems to stay quite right. I'll get it spot on while it's still, but after revving it up and then letting it stop again, the darn thing goes back to twitching. Any secrets here?

[Cold Fusion]

Too much power, is there such a thing? Here is my 65lb-in Brushless Gettys motor for the Y.

[Jamf2]

Thanks of the inflormation cold fusion. I'm keeping a print out of your thread for my own little how to manual. Looking for more of them.

Keep up the good work.

[Cold Fusion]

It's alive!!!

After setting up all the parameters on the VFD, I crossed my fingers and hit Run. After the initial 10 seconds of spoolup time and slight panic by me, it settled in at 3000rpms with a nice little hum. The new Gates Powergrip belts seem to be the source of the most noise, but even that isn't very much. So far I've run it between 1700-3500rpms and it seems to run fine through the entire range.

Tomorrow I'll work on cleaning up the wiring and possibly doing the first under power cut with the X axis.

[DieGuy]

Man you are so far ahead of me. Mine is still in big pieces.

[Cold Fusion]

That's because I'm only a student and have the entire summer to work on it...

[DieGuy]

Well I went out to get some info off the controller today and the heat just about killed me. this weekend is going to be murder as well. Looks like the dawn low temps are going to be in the 90's

[Cold Fusion]

It's just about as bad here in Houston. I'm considering sleeping during the day and waking up at night to work in the garage.

[DieGuy]

Phoemix forecast for Friday Saturday and Sunday 112F, 113F, 113F

[Cold Fusion]

It's only gotten up to 100F here. The humidity is what kills you though. It's kind of like walking into a giant sauna.

[Cold Fusion]

Today was the big day! I cleaned out the entire left side of the garage and moved in my pre-asseblemed controller/drive cabinet. After a little fiddling with Mach2, I flipped the power switch and reset the drive fault. Cautiously I did a slow jog at 20ipm. Everything worked great!

I did run into a very strange problem however. Originally I had setup Mach2 for 14,400 pulses per inch, which should have been correct with my 360ppr Renco encoder . When I put the micrometer on the table it gave me some strange results. Mach2 was jogging in .1" increments, but it was only moving the axis .037". I double checked all the settings in Mach2, as well as looked for mechanical problems. It all seemed perfect. After doing a experimenting, I found that when I entered the ratio for a 1000ppr encoder, it worked great. Maybe I got a mislabeled Renco off ebay?


After solving that problem, I started working on measuring the backlash on all parts of the table. This also yielded some slightly strange results. With the table moved all the way to the right, I'm getting .0015. After moving 5 or so inches to the left, the backlash seems to disappear completely for the rest of the travel.


Right now everything has been paid for, minus some endmills and tslot nuts. Unfortunately my budget has been wrecked by that electrician's bill. Does anyone have some junk bits or beat up nuts lying around they don't need?

[Cold Fusion]

I just a $3000 slot in a piece of 1/4" aluminum.

[Cold Fusion]

Those cuts I did a few days ago were with a 1/8 endmill. Today I managed to find a busted up 1/4 Carbide in the tool chest so I thought I would setup some aluminum and see what happened. This endmill was a 4 flute, although it had one whole flute that had been chipped off. I managed to get 20ipm at 3200rpm with a .1875" depth of cut. Not too shabby, and the finish was quite surprising.

[Cold Fusion]

I do need to install some sort of spray mist lube system. The aluminum chips are welding themselves to the flutes without it.

[lerman]

I do need to install some sort of spray mist lube system. The aluminum chips are welding themselves to the flutes without it.

I had some endmills that I thought were ruined by having aluminum welded to them -- and one $70 carbide key cutter.

My father told me a trick that I will share with you. Put the cutters into a lye solution. It will react with the aluminum, but not with the steel. I used two heaping teaspoons of 100% powdered lye (sodium hydroxide) in a small juice glass of water. I let it sit for around five hours and the tools were as clean as new.

Warning -- lye is dangerous stuff. I put the juice glass inside a stainless steel pan, wore glasses and rubber gloves.

Ken

[damae]

Warning -- lye is dangerous stuff. I put the juice glass inside a stainless steel pan, wore glasses and rubber gloves.

That's a cool trick. I have a water jet cleaning machine at work that uses NaOH as a cleaning solution -- one quart of powered NaOH to about 8 gallons of water. The instructions say that if you spill any on your shoes, you should "discard" your shoes immediately!

Of course, we don't throw our shoes away. But it made us think twice about touching it with our bare hands. I got some on my hand accidentally and it leaves the fingers feeling tingly, like you took a layer of skin off with sandpaper.

Also interesting to hear it's called Lye. We were told it's a chief ingredient in dishwasher soap. Anyway, good warning -- be careful!

[Cold Fusion]

That's a good piece of advice, thanks! Most of the time the bit ends up breaking because of the clogged flutes. If I am able to hit the Estop in time, the chips normally come out with a razor blade.

I've dealt with some pretty nasty chemicals before. Lye is like rainwater comparatively. We once did a test of 97% sulfuric acid on some fabric. It reduced a shop towel to a bubbling black pile of goo in about a second.