[standfast]

Hello all. I am new here and just acquired a 2000 Haas VF2 15/20hp vector drive machine from my employer. I am going to try to fix it and use it at home. I have to get a phase converter for the home shop but I wanted to get an idea of the severity of the issue before I invested in that. I brought the machine home this weekend and I am anxious to figure out what is wrong with it.

The operators at work said that it would get a "spindle drive fault F" and it would come out of high gear without braking (slowing down the spindle) and then the spindle would just free spin until it would come to a stop. It runs fine in low gear but it just won't stay in high gear. I am hoping that it is an issue that can be fixed somewhat cheaply and not something like a ruined gearbox. Any ideas on what this could be? I want to figure out if I should go ahead and buy an RPC for it and try to fix it or if it is something major. I just intend to use the machine for hobby tinkering and learning how to use it. I am in no rush to fix it and I am capable of doing any repair work myself. Any thoughts on it would be greatly appreciated.

[standfast]

After doing a little research I found what the internals of the gearbox look like and how the shifting is performed. The pic from someone's gearbox rebuild on a VF1 but I assume it is more or less the same. I believe what may be happening on my machine is the pneumatic actuator that shifts the machine into high gear may be faulty,leaking air, bad signal to solenoid valves or getting insufficient air supply causing it to not hold the gear up in place. I believe that constant air supply is required to hold it in the high gear position? Then gravity carries it down into a neutral position. Is this plausible? Or is the machine able to stay in high gear without air supply to the actuator? It doesn't seem like it could based on what I have seen so far. http://i1125.photobucket.com/albums/...5/DSCN4576.jpg

[Machineit]

What you will find is that the Spindle Drive Fault F is the spindle drive failing. Check the alarm on the spindle drive itself and it will maybe say "Low DC Buss Voltage." When this happens, the motor does not jump out of gear, it looses all electrical contact and will not use any braking system and will just wind down in free wheel mode. Normally the spindle drive stops the motor, but not if the drive alarms out. Remember that the motor and or gear box does not have a lot of friction to slow it, that is done by the ReGen unit on top of the control cabinet and the spindle drive unit.

My VF2 was giving me a fit a week or so and was throwing drive faults and the spindle would do just that. It is the same as loosing a leg of power such as a fuse being blown on the pole outside. You have current but not what the machine needs, so the spindle freewheels down to zero.

When you get it all setup with your converter, verify the incoming voltage and test it out. Remember to check and use the proper input taps for the appropriate voltage.

By the way, mine cleared itself after a day and a half and has not alarmed out since. Found a re-builder just in case. Fingers crossed!

So, make it fail and then check the spindle drive itself and see what the alarm message is.

Mike

P.S.: The reason it does not seem to happen in low gear is that it is going through the transmission and in high gear it is direct drive (no gear), so the gearbox does not slow it down.

M

[standfast]

Thanks Mike! I guess I should change it to free spinning spindle instead of falling out of gear. So I am guessing the worst case scenario is I have have the Vector drive rebuilt? What kind of RPC would you recommend? I am looking at the American Rotary AD series. Either a 20hp or 30hp.

[Machineit]

I run two VF-2's and other machines off of a 20hp converter. In truth, they are all about the same. My first one I built myself.

Mike

[standfast]

I run two VF-2's and other machines off of a 20hp converter. In truth, they are all about the same. My first one I built myself.

Mike

That's interesting. Are you using a RPC or a PP now? When I talked to the salesman at American Rotary he was trying to sell me a 40HP ADX unit. I thought it seemed like a bit much for a machine that only has a 34 amp max load. Maybe I could get away with just their 20hp model?

I was also considering trying to run it off a 10hp phase perfect.

[Machineit]

Mine was made in someone's garage on a farm in Missouri. No name brand bought off of eBay. There is a lot of hoopla in the comments people make about phase converters until you get into PP and the fancy no motor kind they are really pretty simple.

Like I said before, my first one I had I built myself. Bought a 30 hp motor at a salvage yard in California. I made an adapter and attached a 2 or 3 hp single phase motor to the nose of the 30 hp. I would fire up the 3 hp motor to get the 30 hp up to speed then throw the two legs of 120v to the 30 hp and shut the 3 hp off. Worked perfect and cost me very little. A capacitor type converter just uses stored energy in the capacitors to get it going (power the ghost leg) and not something else. All that is needed is to get the motor rotating a a decent speed before you put the power to it. With only two legs, the 3 phase motor will just sit and hum loudly, it will not turn. The motion of turning generates a current in the windings that has no power in it form the mains and makes the third or (ghost or wild) leg.

Saw one guy one time that made one that used the two motors side by side and a belt between them. He would pull a lever that put tension on the belt by moving the small motor to get the big motor going and put the juice to it and then release the pressure on the belt. Anything that get the main motor going will work.

Even pro-made units will have a difference in voltage between the leg to ground or neutral. Leg to leg they will be about 220v on the legs voltage for all three, depending on your input voltage. But leg to ground will be 120v on the mains legs and about 200v on the wild leg. Your Haas will not care, but I always put the wild leg on the center terminal of the machine. The outside two I think run the mag-starters and most of the solenoids are 120v. Have a very old surface grinder that the coil could not take the wild leg voltage and I had to replace it. Newer coils seem more voltage tolerant. Just to be cautious, I check out all of the machines and make sure the wild leg is not powering the coils on the mag starters. The coils and such that are powered by 120v use a single legs of the incoming voltage legs and if you hook it to the wild leg it will be getting about 200v instead of 120v.

If you can afford a 30hp go for it, but a 20hp will work just fine.

Mike

[standfast]

Great info. It has alleviated some of the hype/paranoia about have a perfect setup to run this machine and will save me a few bucks.

[standfast]

Mike,

I got the converter here. Can you share what size breaker on the single phase side you are running? What gauge wire on each side too if you can recall.

[standfast]

Ok I got the machine up and running on the 20hp RPC I got from crowman converters. It also did not have a working screen when I got it so I got a LCD screen from Cfusion and it works! I just have to mount it in the HMI housing somehow.

Everything seems to work OK so far except I get the spindle drive fault F like I was told the problem it had when I got the machine.

Alarm 102 and Alarm 123. I do not get any other alarms. No DC bus over/under voltage alarms like others have had.

It only seems to happen when at 4000 RPM or higher and the spindle is commanded to decelerate either through a program or just spinning up in MDI mode and using the spindle over ride -10% spindle. So basically anything that tries to decel the spindle instantly shuts off the spindle and it free spins down and alarms out.

Is this a problem with the vector drive or the regen stack? Or something else? How to test?

[Donkey Hotey]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but, that does indeed sound like a bad vector drive. I had a similar failure on my 2004 VF-2. Mine only had the 123 error, not the second one. It turned out to be something wrong on the logic board inside the Vector Drive. No parts available to the consumer to repair it so the only option was to replace it.

Since that time, there seems to be some companies that advertise being able to repair them. Here is just one example. I have no direct experience with them.
Haas Vector Drive repair / spindle drive 20/15 40/30 Vf or SL service!

Another:
93-69-1000 - HAAS - Inverter-General Purpose - HAAS 20/15 HP Vector Drive.

[standfast]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but, that does indeed sound like a bad vector drive. I had a similar failure on my 2004 VF-2. Mine only had the 123 error, not the second one. It turned out to be something wrong on the logic board inside the Vector Drive. No parts available to the consumer to repair it so the only option was to replace it.

Since that time, there seems to be some companies that advertise being able to repair them. Here is just one example. I have no direct experience with them.
Haas Vector Drive repair / spindle drive 20/15 40/30 Vf or SL service!

Another:
93-69-1000 - HAAS - Inverter-General Purpose - HAAS 20/15 HP Vector Drive.

Well, so far a temporary band-aid to keep going is to lower the deceleration parameter (186) from 500000 to 200000. I am not sure what those values represent exactly but it slows down the time to brake the spindle by about a second or so and keeps the machine from alarming out. Not sure how long that will last but it works.