I've spent the last three years bolting this and that to my custom-built controller for an old Excello knee mill. I'm quite used to the idea of throwing in a Mesa card, AMC Amp, and just about any old brushed or brushess motor I can find on ebay, and I generally get satisfactory results. Case in point: I'm wiring up a Nikken tilting/rotary table that - once I metered out the signals - is a simple matter of DC bus, encoder feedback, and a couple of limit switches and brake solenoids. The hardest part was finding enough suppliers with the correct military connectors in stock and at a decent price!
So now, after all this work of pimping up my CNC machine (think lipstick on a pig), I'm contemplating getting a Haas VF-2.
My first notion is to find and plug in a couple of axis cards with +/-10V analog out and 1024-ppr encoder input, some amps with the correct DC-brushed output, but "Ask Haas" told me flat-out, no way. And ... wait. What about the control? Are there 4th and 5th axis buttons that might be missing unless they were ordered as an option? Is the software only installed with up to 3 or 4 axes? I heard somewhere that an unlock code may be required to gain 4th and/or 5th axis control.
Does Haas supply a variety of axis cards and amps to suit my particular table? (Not that they'd support it specifically, but an AMP for example with a voltage input range covering the voltage of my motors.) AMC amplifiers have been particularly flexible for me in this regard. My entire machine runs AMC amps. I'm so fond of them, I have a stack of them just waiting for some new project. As luck would have it, these same amps even fit the motors on my Nikken table.
Anyway, what say all you Haas experts? Am I stuck between a rock and a hard place if I want to bring my Nikken 4th/5th axis over to whatever new Haas VF-2 I buy? Am I stuck shelling out another $20k for a Haas 4th/5th axis trunnion, or a combo-set of Haas rotary tables?
Is the Haas platform so proprietary or inflexible that I can't possibly integrate any other table?
Torin...
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