[amtekinc]

I have been working on repairing a Makino EC3025 with a wire feed problem. Service tech was adamant that I had a connector problem on the WCC board or a bad $5100 board. Not so. I was able to scope out the boards in the machine and then tested them in another. All tested OK. All of my wire feed motor limit switches are working fine. The problem is when I push the "Wire" pushbutton the relays that operate the DR and WU motors turn on momentarily and then turn off. I can force the motors to turn on with the diagnostics. That means that the processor is able to turn them on, but, for some reason in normal operation is not doing so. I get no fault messages and all limit switches seem to be normal as I checked the operation against the working machine next to it. Does anyone have any ideas as to what machine state might prevent the wire feed system from working in manual or auto?

[engrnrk]

have u tried setting the wire feed setting from 0 to 1 in the parameter page? i would like to ask you a question meanwhile, i have the same machine and im having a hard time figuring out how to send a program to the machine. Ive been forced to use MDI..

[amtekinc]

I have looked at all of the parameters regarding the wire feed and can manually force wire feed on in the diagnostics, but, in normal operation the relays for wire feed turn on and then off almost immediately. The machine was running a program and cutting and then stopped wire feeding and has not worked since. I can let you know what our operators use for transfering programs to the makino if you look here later in the week.

[engrnrk]

what are the according values for the wire speeds in the spark condition page? (M61 M62 M63)

[amtekinc]

I am not at the machine today, however, I did check this and did find what I thought was a reasonable wire feed rate for the M-codes.

[Paul Deady]

Amtekinc, I too have a Makino EC 3025.
I presume that the wire is correctly fed all the waty through to the Plastic Bin. Are there no alarms or messages like "Back Block Out".
What happens if in MDI you press water Do you get the flushing water. If you press the Wire button does the wire run? Is anything touching either the wir or heads?
Paul deady

[amtekinc]

Amtekinc, I too have a Makino EC 3025.
I presume that the wire is correctly fed all the waty through to the Plastic Bin. Are there no alarms or messages like "Back Block Out".
What happens if in MDI you press water Do you get the flushing water. If you press the Wire button does the wire run? Is anything touching either the wir or heads?
Paul deady

Since my last post, I have fixed the problem and am not certain as to how i did it. I had the operator set up the machine to run a program and then I forced the wire feed through diagnostics and it ran until I hit reset when it quit and would not restart. I repeated the procedure and let it run for a little longer and when the program stopped the wire feed and restarted it, I pressed reset and then manually was able to restart the wire feed and have not had it fail since. I don't know what I did, but, it has been working for the last week without fail. The EDM gods have smiled!

[Paul Deady]

Amtekinc,
You may want to check thatr the photo electric sensors are clean. One at the top near upper drive rollers and one in the upper head area. If they are dirty can stop wire.
Paul deady

[amtekinc]

Amtekinc,
You may want to check thatr the photo electric sensors are clean. One at the top near upper drive rollers and one in the upper head area. If they are dirty can stop wire.
Paul deady

Do you know if the wire will feed manually when this occurs? Thanks, by the way, as I have learned more about this machine from troubleshooting and from the other people like yourself, than I have from Makino service. I find that end users and operators know more about some technical issues than Makino service. I knew that I had a better understanding of the system than the techs at Makino that I spoke to after I looked at the board schematics and system wiring diagrams that we purchased from them. These are old machines, but, really well built and designed. Unfortunately for machine tool makers, the better they make a machine, the less they sell in the long run as people will hold on to them longer.

[R Pikula]

have u tried setting the wire feed setting from 0 to 1 in the parameter page? i would like to ask you a question meanwhile, i have the same machine and im having a hard time figuring out how to send a program to the machine. Ive been forced to use MDI..

Were you able to solve program transfer? I have a EC3025 and EE3 that "talk" to Mastercam. Let me know.