[Rubes]

...Will anyone even notice this thread that came back from the dead? Stay tuned...

Yep...happy to see you back at this one!!

[TangentAudio]

Had some time last evening to do the final machining on the new stepper mount, on the Tormach 1100. Being able to rough cut it on the waterjet made fixturing so much easier. Two setups, both held in the vise with the back jaw moved to the outside for extra capacity. Used our new Hallmark probe to probe the hole center for origin. Quick and easy!



Resulting part came out pretty nice.



I have to do a little fitup work between the boss of the stepper plate and the two side bars, I modeled it as an interference fit assuming I'd do some minor filing to clean it up. Once that fit is good, I will tap four holes for M8 bolts that hold the plate down onto the side bars. The holes for those bolts are slotted to allow adjustment fore and aft. The NEMA34 stepper motor mounts with four M6 bolts, and those holes are slotted in the other direction so left-right alignment to the ball screw shaft can be dialed in.

[TangentAudio]

Yep...happy to see you back at this one!!

Thanks for coming along for the ride!

[TangentAudio]

Filing the boss of the stepper plate for fitment. Had to remove about 0.004" (~0.1mm) on each side. Wrapped the broad side of the file in masking tape, exposing only the skinny edge - worked great!



Drilling and tapping the holes on the tops of the side bars. Had to get creative with the setup on my drill press as the column is about 31" (78cm) tall.



And here's the NEMA 34 motor bolted up and roughly aligned, spinning the ball screw.

[TangentAudio]

Haven't made much progress this week, but I was able to cut stock to rough size for the head mounting plate last night using the waterjet.



A few details to finalize in my design, then I need to sort out fixturing and do the CAM...

[TangentAudio]

Slow but sure progress. Last night I did the machining for the first setup on the new Z 'saddle', which is what mounts to the linear guide trucks and ball nut on one side, and the head on the other. It also has a center hole to mount the stock pivot that allows the head to be rotated for tramming. I used the classic blue tape and CA glue fixturing technique for this setup, with a scrap of Corian countertop material as a fixture plate. This side of the part is where the Tormach 770 head mounts.

I still need to flip it and run the setup for the reverse side. I should have some time in the next few days to get that done. Then it's nearly time to get everything put back together and see how badly out of square/tram the whole machine is after all of this!

[TangentAudio]

Still have not done the back-side machining for the head mounting plate, but that didn't stop me from doing this...

[TangentAudio]

Still not done with the back side machining, but it's 'done enough' that I could do this...

[TangentAudio]

Had some productive time in the shop yesterday. First step was to make the counterbores for the M6 cap screws a bit deeper. Easy to hold the workpiece in the vise with the jaws flipped to the outside. The touch probe is fairly new and I'm still enjoying the pure luxury of using it.



The major event was machining the back side of the part. The part has 6 M10 tapped holes where the head mounts. I was able to use these to mount to a fixture plate, and then held the fixture in the outer vise jaws. Fairly uneventful except for one programming error that screwed up the pocketing for the middle large bore. But it isn't critical and the mistake was not catastrophic.



The original Sieg X3 head pivot part fits into that pocket nicely. There's a feature I added to the back of the Tormach 770 head which rotates around that as a pivot point for tramming.



A bit of a diversion filling in the logo with paint.





I designed it so the final clearance between the ball nut and the Z plate would be shimmed. Using my feeler gauges I found the correct thickness (0.014") and cut a temporary shim out of brass shim stock. We have a mopa fiber laser at our makerspace and I think I can cut brass on it with some patience, so I will probably make a nicer one at some point.



The majority of the machining on the back side was to create a clearance so that I can bolt on a 0.375" plate to the front of the column, to hopefully improve its torsional stiffness. I will probably get that done via sendcutsend since it will have some complex cuts for the ball nut clearance, etc.

[Buoyen]

Looks perfect

[TangentAudio]

Rebuilt enough of the control electronics and reconfigured LinuxCNC to get some motion and homing working on the new Z axis.

[TangentAudio]

Hauled the column back down to the shop and mounted it back on the machine. Sure is a lot heavier than it used to be!



Aligning the tramming pivot with the hole in the back of the head. I didn't have it under power at this point, so the easiest thing to do was to take the Z stepper off.



And a shot with the head re-mounted. Fit was perfect - I love it when a plan comes together.



Then the motor goes back on...



I was getting tired but I had to get it powered up and moving around. Here's a shot of the chaos in progress. I'm re-doing the control electronics as part of this project. What you see on the bench is the partial breadboard of the new electronics clipped onto a DIN rail. The old electronics/enclosure is the gray rack box on the right.



And the magic moment... Does it work?

https://youtu.be/Sc7GNRTma5o

[Rubes]

Looks good.
Neat project.

[Mr-MaW]

One thing held out for so long. Stick to your dreams.
I also really like my product---Mineral castings.
If you need mineral castings.You can contact me,I'm from China,My company has produced a lot of products, small can reach 100KG, large can do 46 tons.Linear motors