[scadvice]

1996 VMC 15XT. Last night, the machines working along fine on a 30 tool change cycle job, all of a sudden the turret indexes past it’s unload position and alarms out. Lost its position and doesn’t know where to go. Shut her down and also reset the SETTO to no avail. Checked and replaced fuses as book says without results. It will index manually but is still lost as far as order. We’ve been fiddling with the connections and it work once then lost again. Now we are going to by pass that connection and hard wire it and try. Anyone have other ideas?
Thanks Steve

[scadvice]

The connection we hardwired did not work. Help.....
Steve

[scadvice]

It did not index past it's tool position but was indexing toward it and stopped error messaged and the tool carrousel retracted. The Z axis stayed in the tool change plus 4 in. position. no crash...

[alex gitzel]

swap the 2 ice cube and 2 grayhill relays all 4 are on the 1100-2 power dist. board.swap them with the 4 spindle fwd.+rev. relays and test.also go to enter next command screen enter DI then DS to bring up the switch screen make sure the tool count,arm home+ext. and orientation switches are working and that the atc fault switch is not triped.make sure there are no binds or loose connections,the motors rarely go bad so check this stuff first.

[scadvice]

swap the 2 ice cube and 2 grayhill relays all 4 are on the 1100-2 power dist. board.swap them with the 4 spindle fwd.+rev. relays and test.also go to enter next command screen enter DI then DS to bring up the switch screen make sure the tool count,arm home+ext. and orientation switches are working and that the atc fault switch is not triped.make sure there are no binds or loose connections,the motors rarely go bad so check this stuff first.

I'll work through these suggestions tomorrow...Thanks for your comments and help! I wasn't sure yet how I was going to trouble shoot this:cheers:
Steve:banana:

[scadvice]

...for now. :banana:
Thank you Alex for leading toward the wiring diagram and the Grayhill relays. The appears to have been either corrosion at one of the two relays to the turret, or one of the relays is weak, or both of the above. Switched the relays with the spindle relays and the turret works. Cleaned the connections and reversed them back. Now after a hour plus worth of tool changes, all is working fine. I've ordered 3 relays just in case one is getting weak (16 bucks each is cheap insurance).
Steve

[scadvice]

We have put in all new relays on the 1100-2 power dist. board. Replaced the count Prox sensor going to the Turret motor and brought up the command screen entered DI then DS to bring up the switch screen make sure the tool count... no signal! Now we are checking voltages.

Info:

The Grayhill relay is now made by Magnecraft and has the same p/n. We
replaced a couple of these last year.

The "green" relay is a Grayhill 70YY14303.

The ice cube relay is an Omron MY4.

A couple questions...
We have found where the hall switch plugs into the board. Three wires
(VCC, signal, and ground). We can uplug the switch from the board and
check voltages. If we check voltage from VCC to ground we get 5V. We also
get 5V when we check signal to ground. Does this make sense? Why
would they be sending 5V thru the signal wire?

At the switch and with the switch plugged in, We get 3.6V from VCC to
ground (voltage drop?). We read you should check the signal voltage
across a resistor. Using a 50 ohm resistor, We get .62V from signal to
ground.

This number does not change when we wave a magnetic near the switch.
Shouldn't we be able to measure a change in the voltage?

The wire harness looks to be replace by someone and not OEM the color coding is wrong. Thus the low voltage and intermittent ATC alarm...

At this point we suspect the wire harness to the board may be bad and or the new relay may also be suspect. We right now are replacing the wire harness before we send the relay back for a new one.

Any Fadal people out there have other ideas on what we can check on???:idea:

Steve

[scadvice]

"The wire harness looks to be replace by someone and not OEM the color coding is wrong. Thus the low voltage and intermittent ATC alarm...

At this point we suspect the wire harness to the board may be bad and or the new relay may also be suspect. We right now are replacing the wire harness before we send the relay back for a new one."

Replacing the wire harness fixed the problem. We think they some how had the sig. and grn. transposed thus the low volts and putting us on the low voltage side at times of power drop from the main. (This is a guess, we are not electrical wizards). Anyway, the low voltage problem is now gone with the new harness.:banana:

Steve

[Scanfab]

And for anyone wanting the next tip if the servo style ATC rotation stops working-the ATC (AC to)DC powers supply big blue capacitor on the power supply board can un-mount itself after lots of steel rough cutting(vibration). It sits in the correct place(horizontally) but the contact can be severed as I found out after hours of paying tech to search for it. We changed tools manually for a week(in production) cuz of that!

[scadvice]

And for anyone wanting the next tip if the servo style ATC rotation stops working-the ATC (AC to)DC powers supply big blue capacitor on the power supply board can un-mount itself after lots of steel rough cutting(vibration). It sits in the correct place(horizontally) but the contact can be severed as I found out after hours of paying tech to search for it. We changed tools manually for a week(in production) cuz of that!

I feel for ya Scanfab!

We only spent 2 days 'figgin' it out. We are now at 250 parts post fix and no problems with more than 2250 tool changes.:banana:

Steve