[davereagan]

Gentlemen,
I own a Mighty vertical machining center model Mustang C-42, new in June 1999 with Vickers 2100 control, which I love except at times like this. I got a fault tonight that would not go away with several restarts: Output/Fuse Failure in APC Rack 0. Is there a rack 0? I checked the 24vdc power supply and all fuses and they are good. The power supply has 23.7 volts. The passing green lights come on for the Workstation board, Realtime board, Bridge board and also, the I/O board.
I don't heat my shop when I am not in, so it was ~40 degrees when I came in today and occasionally the system has some kind of fault on the first startup because of the low temperature, but runs fine after that. Even after making sure the control box was 70 degrees inside, this fault kept happening. All the boards pass their diagnostic checks. Can the system get past those diagnostics and still have a bad hard drive or workstation processor board? What are your thoughts/ suggestions?

Regards,
David Reagan

Reagan Testing Tools
2171 Avon Industrial Drive
Rochester Hills, MI 48309
Tel: 248-495-0713

[maver1ck]

I'm not sure which I/O hardware Mighty was using on that machine so have to be generic with the answer. If you can trust the wording of the alarm, it would seem there are fuses on the output side of the I/O card. Did you check these too? You mentioned checking your fuses and power supply, but did you check to see if any of your devices are getting power.

In most cases, Rack 0 is the first I/O rack, and Rack 1 (if present) would be the second, etc. When does the alarm come up? Could give clues as to what is causing it.

Yes it is possible for the control to pass diagnostics and still have a bad hard drive or WS board, that is the nature of intermittent problems. In the case of the hard drive, it could be corrupted in a section that isn't accessed regularly, and only fails when the corrupted/bad sectors are accessed. This is unlikely to be causing the issue you are seeing now though. Since you mentioned cold startup issues, we had a shipping computer that wouldn't come up in the AM when the temp was low, the issue was the HDD wouldn't spin up at the lower temps but once it warmed up, would work fine.

[davereagan]

Thank you for your response Maverick. There is only one bank of about ten fuses in the entire control enclosure and I checked them all. Friday night, the control had been on for 24 hrs and the temperature inside the enclosure was 70 degrees F. Still had the fault. Since my opening post, Dave Lyle from Siemens emailed me back and he thinks the Realtime CPU board is the cause since this fault comes through that board. He suggested covering the contact marked in the attached picture on the CMHD board to rule out the CMHD as the cause. I did cover that contact with electrical tape and the error still came up. Tomorrow, I am getting another hard drive to try from a Ghost image of the hard drive I took some years ago. In the last couple of months, even when warm, the machine has been quite slow between screens and had frequent lockups with no fault, but requiring a restart. My hard drive died in 2005 (and the ghost image saved me then) and as I recall, the control was acting slow before that failure too. I had the realtime CPU board exchanged two years ago, so I was not suspecting it to be bad.

Regards,
David Reagan
248-495-0713

Attachment 213622

[slowlearner]

Thanks for the tip!

[maver1ck]

I tried to reply to your PM, but received an error that your message folders were full.

[davereagan]

Maverick,
I'm not sure why my messages would show full. I don't have any. Please email me at [email protected] I am about to send my RT board into Siemens for repair.

Regards,
David Reagan

Reagan Testing Tools
2171 Avon Industrial Drive
Rochester Hills, MI 48309
Tel: 248-495-0713

[davereagan]

Just a follow up. I purchased a realtime board from Ebay (3-424-2400A01) which appears to be a new part number in the past two years. It works great and now I still have my old realtime board so I can look for someone capable of repairing a cpu board.