Hello Machinists!
I've been a member for quite a while here but really haven't had much time to fiddle with cnc machines until recently when I got a pretty good deal on a used 4-Axis (XYZA) Sharnoa CNC Mill. I have a good bit of electronics background, but not much mechanical.
I retrofitted the machines old Glentek drives with Gecko Drives (320X) to drive the DC Servos (12A 140v) which had I believe 500 count encoders, and used the existing Transformer PSU to power the drives @ 80VDC.
For Control i'm currently running off the Mach3. The machine Mechanically only had 0.002" backlash in almost all the axises which I compensated for via Mach. I'm fairly new to machining stuff myself, even though I have a quite a few family members who have multiple HAAS / FADAL machines with crazy tolerances, still learning what feed-rates work well with what materials etc and i'm slowly learning by breaking a few end mills here and there .
Now I'm looking to add control I/O for program run/stop, jog wheel, spindle start, etc and wanted to see what options I have. Currently the control PC has 2 parallel ports, only one of them is being used for the Gecko drives.
Also, does anyone have any manuals for this machine? I haven't been able to make a "brain" program in Mach3 to run the auto-lube pump for 2seconds every 1.5mins... Does anyone know how that can be achieved?
If anyone has any ideas as far as maybe something I missed, what else can I do with the machine retrofit? please let me know. I have attached some pictures of the machine before the retrofit, I will post more pictures as I Add/Change things...
-Allen