[zmajmr]

Hey

So you could get your ballscrews reground, I am considering this, but I will wait till the machine is completely together before doing so. I will test the accuracy and backlash. I will probably have to regrind or purchase one z axis ballscrew, I can feel a very small amount of axial play in the nut, but no longitudinal play, so it may still be holding tolerances.

As for the ballscrew cover, there is a series of small steel cylinders that collapse on eachother to protect the ball screw. I am not a big fan of this because oil, grease, water, and chips could get in the ball screw, especially water and waterbased coolant. So I will attempt to find an accordion style ball screw cover and adapt it to replace the old ball screw cover.

I attempted to cold blue one of the cylinders without much success, I will post pics online tomorrow my phone wont upload pics to cnczone ;(. I did however find a gunsmith that would hot blue them back to factory spec for a few hundred bucks, I may just want to buy the hot salts and do it myself, I have a lot of parts that I want to blue. The spindle Pulley (outside only), ball screw covers, hardware, some of the steel plates and covers, I'd love to blue the cover plates on the machine, but we will see .

I did a lot of electrical diagram work and electrical testing. I finally got the hybrid servos to work great, took a minute to figure out but its working now. Something that I did not take into account was the large amount of inputs and outputs that I needed. I will have to use my 3rd lpt port on the Ethernet SmoothStepper to accomplish this. Heck I need 8 inputs alone for the turret indexor, an input to sense turret down/turret up. I will need a door alarm input, I will need some oemtriggers for cycle start, feed hold, stop, reset, these will be mounted on the panel with the main screen. My MPG will be handheld and will have a lot of function on it so I wont have to worry about that.

I will need a heck of alot of outputs to trigger the air solenoids probably 20. Some for the coolant, and other things along the way.

I will be taking the beds up to Birmingham alabama tuesday to get the reground. Ill spend the day there and then drive back that afternoon with them. 5 hour drive...but it will be so worth it!

Till tomorrow

Hi

I know for that option, to reground ball screws, only thing is that nobody do those kind of things in area where I live or maybe in whole country. I saw lot of companies in USA do those kind of things, I guess you have lot of machines with ballscrews there. My idea was to clean ballscrews (which I did ) and inspect condition, I found inside of ballscrew nut lot of things, debris from smashed balls, somebody already tried to compensate wear with inserting larger balls. So I can use them now as they are but there is visible backlash, probably I can compensate that with Mach3 but if I would not be happy maybe I will buy new one, it is very important thing , same as spindle bearings. When you buy something cheap there is always reason for that so I do not complain.

I never heard for cold blue so I will be waiting for new pics to see what is that. If you want and have will you can record process of regrounding your ways on your machines, that would be cool to see on youtube.

Maybe you can buy PLC for you turret, maybe I will need to buy one, I have lot of sensors and valves on my machine too.

I have card with almost all what you need for basic CNC lathe but I have a feeling that maybe that will not enough for all those things in my machine.

Well, till tomorrow :cheers: