Hello CNC people out there,
I've been asking questions & questions here in CNCZone, and
I think I can now show you most of my progress at this moment.
This project started quite long before ever since I have purchased a greatly WRONG machine from China.
This photo was taken at the very date it arrived.
Attachment 331780
It has all good things in it like Leadshine closed-loop steppers, PMI guide rails, 2.2kW Changsheng spindles, etc except they were built in a wrong way.
Here is one old thread by me
* I warn you to stay away from these guys or similar looking machines by all means.
They are selling variants of this design under many brands, not only from this company.
* One very important point : if you look at the pictures closely, you will be able to see that there is only ONE bearing support for the ball screw.
There's no support at the motor side. All variants are same, this is ridiculous and you will see indicator dancing when the ball screw is rotating.
Not to mention parallelism/slignment/bed flatness are all wrong. They are totally wrong beyond one can manage at his shop.
I tried various things like new bed and re-machining LM holes;
Attachment 331782
Far much greater than before but still not up to my standard.
OK, enough said.
Undergoing painful period with the machine, I desired to make a complete new one.
I made a wish list first;
- all servo system with encoder feedback, regardless of open or closed-loop
- gantry moving structure
- re-using already made $1,000 valued one-piece aluminium 6061 T6 30mm thick bed, machined by ultra-quality MCT
- swappable spindle between 2.2kW VFD driven high-rpm and a servo-belt-driven milling spindle
- 4th axis add-on
- 3D digitizer/Touch plate active without changing settings
- a little bit more...
And I started my drawings...
Attachment 331778
It is not shown in the picture but I put actual weight or simulated weight of every possible components into solidworks so that I can locate center-of-gravity in the middle of gantry bearing blocks as long as I can. Some minor components are missing like cables or screws, I ignored them.
Drawing the whole machine took really a lot of time. Searching for useful components, re-designing, calculating positions, hole locations, lead of ball screws, possible max rpm, etc...
And I started fabricating components.
Gantry was made out of cast aluminium, costed me total under $200 because I made wooden form myself.
Machining was outsourced, by same company who did the beautiful bed.
Attachment 331784
Attachment 331786
Attachment 331788
Y-axis dual-shaft mount was outsourced too - I couldn't make it myself.
Attachment 331790
* big one at the bottom, made out of one piece 7075 T6 aluminium
and the rest were done by me.
Attachment 331792
* Y axis motor plate
Attachment 331794
* Y axis rear-mount for ball screw
Back panel was machined using the poor CNC before I dissembled it.
Attachment 331796
Well.. originally, I dreamed of KFLOP controlling everything.
I bought one piece of KFLOP, playing it quite a long time, bothering Mr. Kerkes countless times by postings and mails and tried to make my own breakoutboard like this;
Attachment 331798
Fried one..... uh... okay.. it might happen.. I am no electronics expert....
I ordered another... fried second one.. uh...oh... my god...
I still don't know exact cause of this failure, however, no time to waste like this...
Immediate turned to possible alternatives, and decided to try ethernet smooth steppers from Warp9.
To get encoder feedback from servo drives, I still needed another board to do that and this time it was successful.
It is very boring without a video.. so I prepared many...
Testing control box/servo connection/encoder readout
https://youtu.be/-CNSkyjf7mE
Testing homing WITH index pulse
https://youtu.be/PXJ6poKJplU
Mach3 screen mod, and made covers for Y-ball screws
https://youtu.be/RlUXsRYzQ5s
XY axis test
https://youtu.be/NGhw_qFGhXo
I am putting some accessories at the moment - oil distribution, limit switches, cable managements..
More will be followed soon...
Cheers,
Kevin