[Thomas Zamirski]

Hello everyone! First time poster here. This thread will be a log for retrofitting my Mazak VQC 15/40 mill. Hope you guys follow along and enjoy the show. I'm also looking forward to getting some tips and suggestions along the way so feel free to jump in at any point!

So I'll start off with a little back story. I've been working at my family's machine shop for almost a decade now and all we had were CNC lathes, no CNC mills just an old Bridgeport knee mill. Being an engineer I've always wanted to make my own creations but having only access to CNC lathes I always felt limited. So for a number of years now I've wanted to get my hands on a CNC mill. I eventually came across an old Mazak VQC 15/40 on an online auction site. Not much info was posted about the machine on the site but I figured if the controller was dead it wouldn't have mattered as I was planning on retrofitting anyways. I just hoped the machine was mechanically sound and knowing Mazak's reputation I don't think that was to much of a worry. I went ahead and bid on it and crossed my fingers. Luckily the bidding didn't go to high and made out with what I think was a good deal. That was back in November.

When it arrived at our shop I was able to take a close look at what I got myself into. At first glance the machine looked really well put together; a nice solid design. That being said though I don't think the previous owner has the word "cleaning" in their vocabulary. I don't think the machine was cleaned in a day of its life. It was caked with coolant and chips everywhere. So I knew I had a lot of scrubbing ahead of me. Check out the photos to get an idea.

The first problem we ran into was getting the machine into the shop. For whatever reason the z axis wasn't lowered onto wooden blocks and was left in the highest position and measuring the height as best we could we knew it was going to be a tight fit through the door. I looked around on the web to see if and how to lower the spindle manually and couldn't find anything. So I took off the covers on the spindle to get a better look. I noticed a brake on the z-axis ballscrew and tried to manually release it by pushing and pulling on the flanges but no luck. We decided to give it a shot and see how much we're off by. Long story short we had to take a piece of weather stripping off from the top of the door and remove 3 tiny hex screws that held the grill over the spindle cooling fan and then it just barely slide into the door way with the forks of the forklift skidding on the ground. I found out a way to lower the spindle manually so I'll do a short post about it when I get a chance so other's won't be stuck in the same situation I was.

Once I got a close look I was able to make a plan and set goals on what I wanted to get done.
So the plan:

• Remove all the panels so I can thoroughly clean the base of the machine and all the critical components (linear rails, ballscrews, etc).
• Sandblast the panels and repaint them to give the machine a fresher appearance.
• Fire up the machine to see if it even works and fix whatever needs to be fixed (hopefully nothing).
• Retrofit the machine with a new controller.

Here are some photos before I started to take it all apart. I don't know why I didn't take a wide shot of the entire machine or of the pallet changer.

[Thomas Zamirski]

Here are the remaining photos from Day 1. I began to take panels off from around the tool changer magazine. It is here that you can see how bad the coolant and swarf is caked on to everything. Lots of fun ahead!

[Thomas Zamirski]

Here are some photos from Day 2. I took apart the tool changer magazine to get a thorough clean. I'm amazed that this thing still functioned (assuming it was still functional) with so much filth everywhere. There's also a photo of the over machine with some of the panels removed as well as the pallet changer. Not much going on here just removing panels and cleaning.

[Thomas Zamirski]

Photos from Day 3. Took off the x-axis way cover and discovered a heap of swarf sitting on the servo motor. These chips got in everywhere! They'll find any nook and cranny and just pile up inside. The photo is after I removed most of the chips away. I started to explore the pallet changer and just felt overwhelmed with the amount of cleaning needed to be done. As they say... one step at a time. In another photo you can see some good progress on the base of the tool magazine coming along quite nicely. I used purple power to clean all the dried up coolant. It does a good job at cutting right through that gunk.

[Thomas Zamirski]

Photos of Day 4. I took off the main enclosure panel from the machine. I had to move the pallet changer away from the machine in order to remove the main panel. I used a car jack and placed it up against the base of the machine and pushed the pallet changer away. Then added some wood blocks and placed the car jack back in place and repeated the process until the changer was far enough out of the way for us to get the enclosure off. With all the panels off and out of the way you can begin to appreciate the solidness of this machine. Box ways on the z-axis and linear guide rails on the x and y axes. The one thing that I can already tell will be annoy is that I won't be able to have anything overhanging off of the table otherwise it will crash into one of the columns. It seems like it has happened before as there were a couple of dents on the main enclosure panel right in the line of fire.

[Thomas Zamirski]

Day 5 photos. More cleaning progress. Some detailed photos of the tool changer magazine components being cleaned. I decided to buy new bearings for the sprockets and the Geneva cam driver shaft because they had a rough grinding feeling when they were spun and that's not ideal. Although there is nothing "high speed" about the tool changer I felt it was a good idea to replace the bearings just for peace of mind. Plus they were dirt cheap on ebay so it worked out alright. Again purple power making it easy. Just wear gloves cause it'll make your hands really rough and dry especially during the winter time.

[petruscad]

Thomas, there are tapped holes for four M6 bolts at the very top of the spindle shaft, what are they for? I though that there's where the pull flange bolts on for the differential drawbar but now since you're saying its not differential I wonder what goes there...

[petruscad]

Interesting...

This is not usually the case in other milling machines; most seem to have a mechanism that creates a differential force so the bearings are not put under load. Maybe this spindle has bearings with enough static load capacity to not get hurt by the load. However, since the differential mechanism is not that complicated I think I'm going to make it so as to push only on the drawbar and not on the spindle shaft.

The clamping force given by various sources is indeed in the 2000-2500lb range.

[Thomas Zamirski]

Yea. The bearings can definitely take it. When I rebuilt the spindle I replaced the bearings with two pair of NSK 7014CTRDULP4Y. According to the catalog the 7014C bearings have a permissable axial load of 26.8kN (6,025lbs). Because they are paired up at each end, two bearing would be taking an axial load so the spindle in this configuration can take up to 12,050 lbs axially. When unclamping, the springs are compressed further than when they are holding a tool in the taper so a higher load than the 2500 lb figure given will be experianced. I'm not sure what that figure is but even if it was double (5000lbs) then you can see that it is far lower than what the bearings are able to take.

If it's not that much extra work then making a differential mechanism might be the way to go as taking any unnecessary load off the bearings is always a plus. But if it gives you a lot of extra work then I would just say to keep it simple and just put a hydrualic or pneumatic piston that pushes down against the drawbar fork.

Since I rebuilt the spindle I've probably put over 15,000 tool changes on it and over a thousand hours of max rpms and the spindle bearings are still whisper quiet.

-Tom

[aventtini888]

what controller are you useing?

[Thomas Zamirski]

Hey Aventtini! Glad you asked. I'll be using a Kflop along with a Kanalog board and a Konnect board for additional outputs. After studying the wiring diagram I concluded that I'll need 38 outputs and 58 inputs not including the analog outputs for servo amps and spindle drive or the quadrature encoder inputs. I'll be using the existing servo amps and spindle drive. The machine is currently equipped with resolvers so I purchased some high count encoders to take their place. I'll get into more detail in a later post so stick around!

[Nigel Tufnel]

Wow, quite an undertaking you got there. I know how you feel about the endless cleaning. My restoration feels like 80% cleaning, 20% progress. Keep posting before and after pics, very satisfying.

Can you spin the spindle by hand? How does it feel?

[Thomas Zamirski]

Thanks Nigel. Yea I know the feeling. Sometimes I feel like I take 3 steps forward and 2 steps back but luckily most of the cleaning is done.

As far as the spindle goes it spins very freely. You can easily spin it with just your pinky. The bearings feel very smooth and if you spin it up by hand as fast as you can it'll spin for a few seconds.

[Thomas Zamirski]

This post will basically sum up what happened between December and early June.

I was contracted to do a website in late November so I knew I wouldn't have a lot of time to spend on this machine for several months but at the same time I knew that the $$ would be vital in getting this project done. So between working at the machine shop, the website and a few other side projects I haven't had much time to put into working on the machine. In February I did buy a used air compressor that I then decided to rebuild. We needed a bigger air compressor for the shop and I needed something with some decent throughput to use for sandblasting.

Back in December I bought a gas powered pressure washer along with a sandblasting attachment. I thought this would have been more effective than using traditional dry sand blasting but it was a flawed system. When it worked it worked well although being drenched with water in mid December here in New Jersey isn't fun. However it was difficult keeping the sand in the nozzle from clogging up so eventually I just gave up on it and sold the pressure washer. That was before I had a big enough air compressor to do dry sand blasting.

At some point in December I managed to hookup the Mazak to some power and air and fire her up. I was pleased to see that everything turn on and seemed to be in good working order. I first had to figure out how to home the axes. I fiddle around with that for a bit and finally found out that you have to jog the axis away from the home switch an inch or so and then jog the axis back towards the home switch until you hit the switch. The machine then runs through its homing cycle for that axis. If the axis is already on the switch then as you jog away from the switch the controller will see that you were already on the switch so it runs the homing cycle as soon as you come off of the switch.

I then proceeded to run the spindle. Everything seemed fine there. I ran it up to its max (6000rpm) and it sounded good.

I then decided to do some simple backlash tests to see what condition the ballscrews were in. I placed an indicator on the table and indicated off of the spindle to get backlash readings for X and Y axes. I would move the axis using the hand wheel a couple of inches until a reading would show up on the indicator. I would then zero the indicator and back off .0001 and see if I would get a reading. To my surprise I had 0 backlash in the X and Y axes over different points of their respective travels.

The z-axis on the other hand had some backlash. I was getting just under .0005 backlash on the z. At first thought backlash on the Z doesn't really make sense since the weight of the spindle would always be pushing down on the ballnut and as long as an external upward force would not exceed the weight of the z-axis assembly there should be no backlash. This machine, however, uses a hydraulic counterbalance which negates the weight of the spindle but in turn adds a slight amount of resistance to z-axis motion. Add the slight stick slip from the box ways and that will be enough resistance to cause some backlash. With a properly preloaded ballnut the backlash shouldn't be this high unless there's a lot of static resistance in the setup. I'll have to retest the z-axis backlash across different points of its travel and see if I'm getting consistent results. The machine uses the double nut type ballnuts which use a spacer between the two nuts to provide the preload. Maybe I'll add a shim or make a thicker spacer to remove the backlash. If anyone has some experience bringing new life to old ballscrews jump on in.

I also played around with the pallet changer using the manual controls. Everything seems in good working order which was a big relief considering I bought the machine blind with little to no information about its condition. There were only two minor issues. When the pallet door is closed the solenoid leaks air so I'll probably replace it with a new one and there is a very minor air leak coming from the spindle; probably the spindle air blast solenoid leaking.

After that I really didn't touch the machine until early June because of all the other things I had going on. I'll leave it off at that and in the next post I'll start off with some more current stuff.

[mazakfred]

ORIGINAL MAZAK MAZATROL M2.

ARE THERE DIFFERENT TYPES?


Will look at the servo motor> with brushes Mitsibischi / under technical telephone helpline Mazak is the tachometer that measures and controls the speed ..


grtz
pdf

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[Thomas Zamirski]

For those who are wondering how to manual release the z-axis brake here's what to do. The brake is up towards the top of the z-axis ballscrew just above the belt pulley. You'll probably have to take off some panels to get to it. You'll need to undo the two wires going into the brake and apply a voltage. The brake is rated for 24v but I managed to get the brake to release at 12v. I used a battery pack that had 10 1.2v NiMH batteries that I had laying around. I know this technically isn't manual brake release but it'll get your spindle down if your machine isn't hooked up to the panel. I'm not sure if the brake has a polarity but just to be safe I applied the - side of the battery pack to the "G24" wire which is the ground for the 24v power supply and applied + to the "60" wire which is the 24v signal. In my case the hydraulic counterbalance kept the z-axis from running away. Instead it slowly went down but your setup might be different so be prepared by holding the pulley and use caution.

[Thomas Zamirski]

So back in early June I managed to snag a good deal on a Kflop + Kanalog on eBay. Soon after I bought a wiring diagram from Mazak. After studying the wiring diagram I noticed that all the digital I/Os that I was interested in were going through 4 cables (CND1, CND2, CND3, CND4). I'm not sure what CND5 and CNA10 are used for. I suspect they are for options that are not implemented on my machine. So my thought is to buy 4 MR-50L Honda connectors and wire them to my kflop setup and plug them right in to the terminal board that way I don't have to touch anything past the terminal board.

I made an excel spreadsheet, which I'll post down below, with a list of all the digital inputs and outputs that I'll need to interface with and a list of the pin connections of the 4 connectors. If you have a VQC and are planning on doing a retrofit please don't use this info without looking at the wiring diagram that is specific to your machine first. There are many variations to the VQC and are probably wired differently and have different options so use this info only as a starting point.

As you can see there are way more I/Os required than the kanalog can handle on its own. Originally I was going to buy a Konnect expansion board which has 32 inputs and 16 outputs and make my own circuit board that would interface to the FET relay drivers and the 8 inputs and 8 outputs found on the 40 pin IDC header on the Kanalog. However I decided to scrap that idea and just go with 2 Konnects. This will get me 64 optically isolated inputs and 32 optically isolated outputs plus the 8 opto inputs and 8 opto outputs on the Kanalog. That should be more than enough to handle all the I/Os for my machine.

I also bought some computer parts and put together a PC to act as the front end of the cnc controller. It's a mini-itx motherboard with an i3 4150, 2GB ram and a 60GB SSD. I mounted it to an open air chassis as it would be pointless to put it in a standard computer case since this is going to be inside the electrical cabinet anyways. The PC is going to be used just for KmotionCNC so 2GB is plenty. The SSD allows for extremely quick bootup times; Less than 15 seconds from hitting the power button to having KmotionCNC ready to go. The i3 is overkill for this task and probably could have gone away with a Celeron but hey... what the hell.

As mentioned before the machine is currently equipped with resolvers for position feedback. Although it is possible to use resolvers with the Kflop and Kanalog its not an easy implementation so I went ahead and purchased some encoders. The encoders I got are 20,000 PPR 3 channel encoders; 2 quadrature channels and an index channel. I'll be using the index channel for homing the axes with maximum accuracy. The ballscrews on the machine have a pitch of 10mm so that'll equate to 50,800 pulses per inch which will give me a resolution of 0.0000197 inches. At these high encoder counts maximum frequency may be an issue. The maximum frequency for the encoders I have is 250kHz. This frequency applies to cycles rather than pulses. The encoders will be attached directly to the ballscrews and the fastest they spin at is 2000rpm. That'll equate to 167kHz which is well within allowable numbers. Also the Kflop's maximum input frequency for encoders is 1Mhz. However I am not sure if that is pulses per second or cycles per second but regardless I am still well within the margins.

(20,000 pulses / rev) / (10mm / rev) * (25.4mm / inch) = 50,800 pulses per inch

(2000 rev / min) / (60 sec / rev) * (5000 cycles / rev) = 166,667 cycles per second

[mazakfred]

Hi Thomas,

I have just the same category mazak milling and follow with attention your tread considering I also want to retrofit the milling machine
I would like to work with CS Lab materials and software Mach3, considering this is my first project, I have many questions about I / O settings because that is my hat too far.
Also have a mazak slant turn 40n / 1500 are seen to retrofit the backup battery is empty and all the machines parameters away
All info is welcome

Kinds regard

Freddy from Belgium/ Europe

PS the Mazak lathe, I have all mechanical, electrical diagrams and parameters : Banana:

[Thomas Zamirski]

Hey Freddy. Glad you're following along. Sorry I haven't been posting for the past couple of months. I have been getting kind of distracted from a bunch directions so things have been moving slowly but I have been making some progress. Unfortunately I won't be able to help you out with your Slant Turn. I am not familiar with that machine. However I will be able to help out with your Vertical Mill, especially if it's a VQC 15/40.

If you plan to use the existing servo amplifiers in the machine then you'll need some device to create the +/-10V to control them. If you're using Mach 3 with just the standard PC parallel port then that will only output step and direction signals which are incompatible with these older industrial amplifiers. You will need some sort of converter card, such as a YAPSC:10V, or a standalone controller such as a Kflop/Kanalog control board which can be interfaced to Mach3.

You will also need to swap out the resolvers out with quadrature encoders and wire them back to whatever is closing your position loop; whether it's the converter cards or a motion control board. From what I understand Mach 3 doesn't close the position loop but rather relies on servo drives to close the position loop however the servo amplifiers in these industrial machines do not close the position loop.

Check out this site to get a better idea of what you need/want to do.

I personally chose the kflop + kanalog option because it gives you the ability to run the servos at high speeds even with hi-resolution encoders and easily interfaces to older amplifiers that use +/-10V analog inputs. The kflop also offers the reliability and speed of a standalone controller which offloads most of the processing from the PC allowing you to use a cheaper/slower computer. I also have 2 konnects that handle most of the inputs and outputs for the machine.

If there's specific questions you have then feel free to ask. I'll be happy to help in any way I can.

I'll try to post some updates on my progress in the next couple of days.