Over the past few months we've been converting our Chester Centurion 500 to CNC to allow us to partially automate runs and allow for more complex machining.
This was when it was new.
Here are some of the parts for the Y axis
And here with the new ballscrews and stepper motors installed
Electronics wise, we are using the following:
BOB
Drivers
Steppers
Its all controlled by Mach3 and we've ran a few thousand lines of G Code without breaking anything yet
We do, however appear to be having a few issues.
1. The dreaded backlash, whats odd is we appear to have different amounts for each direction of travel on each axis
2. Scaling, we used the "set steps per unit" wizard but although this appears to be correct, depending on where you are on the axis it moves varying amounts, sometimes 1mm will be 1.03, other times 0.98
3. When jogging up and down the axis, the motors appear to jolt, almost like the jolt when backlash comp is triggered so we are wondering if they are missing a step.
4. When pocketing, holes end up being roughly 0.2mm too small, and more ofthen than not, not quite circular.
Drivers are currently set to 4.2 Amps, Half Current, 1/10th Microstep. Mach3 has been set to 25k and 45k kernal speed and we've got the motor velocity set at 800mm/min.
We are making progress though and are already looking at changing to a VFD and installing some form of cooling system.
We've only been performing slow cuts (100-150mm/min) so far, hopefully there'll be more to come
You can see a few videos of it in action here definately not the most effective programming but we want to get familiar with everything first.