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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158

    Supermax YCM-16VS Re-retrofit/Upgrade

    About two months ago I bought this Supermax YCM-16VS Vertical Turret Mill from a friend. It was previously owned by Tektronix and resided in the Model Dept where it was converted to CNC by a local company. It was fitted with an TERA 4030 series CNC control with Glentek Servo Drives and Motors, Heidenhain glass scales, Bridgeport belt housings, Ballscrews on X and Y, and a Air assist ballscrew on the knee.

    My friend sold it to me because he could not get it to work. The control would come on but when you went to turn on the servo it would just shut off as soon as you let go of the button. He messed around with the servo drives and eventually it just set around for about 2 years. I was looking for a mill and was looking at a Jet vertical cnc. I told my friend I was looking at getting it and he offered to sell me his supermax. This was better for me as the Jet was a dedicated CNC machine. No real manual controls and the head was fixed so no pan or tilt. Plus since he is a friend I can barter and trade!

    So I offered him something he couldnt refuse as a true lover of gizmos (His site: http://www.surpusgizmos.com ) I traded him an Esab Plasma Cutter I rebuilt, a bottle for his Mig welder, a Kurt vice, and a little cash. All in all I have about $1100 out of pocket into the machine.

    It weighs in at somewhere around 2700lbs at best guess. Getting it home would be fun. Luckily I have a friend who does fabrication and weding on heavy equipment so I enlisted his help. He has a 10000 lb crane on his truck. Using that we lifted it up and onto the back of my friends pickup, tied it down and brought it over. Picked it back out and set it on a pallet where I used a pallet jack to move it into the garage.

    Here are some pics of moving it.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails DSC02652.jpg   DSC02654.jpg   DSC02657.jpg   DSC02674.jpg  

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  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    So the first thing I had to do is solve the three phase problem. It was set up for 208v. Looking through it is seems everything except for the motor is designed o run either on 120v or 240v single phase. Simple enough! I picked a phase to get rid of and went about moving all of the circuits so the shared the two remaining legs.

    The motor was controlled by a standard 3 phase mechanical interlocking reversing contactor. I have a 2HP vfd that can handle up to 7.5 amps continuious whicj is what the motor is rated for (Although the motor is rated for 3 hp.). I mounted the motor right where the contactor was. The contactor was driven by two small icecube relays so I rewired that to control the fwd/rev inputs on the VFD. For now I just set the hi output to 60hz and put a jumper from the 10v conection to the analog in. This gives me a basic fwd/off/rev capability. Good enough.

    Hit the power button on the control and the machine booted! So far so good! Tried turn on servo power. Did the same thing as it ws doing for my friend. As long as you hold down the button it works, but it wont latch in. I played around and couldnt figure out the maze of wiring.

    I managed to get a hold of a couple of the guys that had originally ran this machine when it was at Tek. He said what might cause servo to trip was no air to the machine. On the back of the mill is an air regulator with a copper line disappearing into the base of the mill. He told me this was an air balance that took the weight off of the knee ballscrew. If there is no air the servo can trip. I tried hooking up air and no difference.

    Next day I headed down to my friends shop. He had all the manuals for the control, schematics for the console and back control box, and even the manual for the mill. SCORE!

    Well, with the schematics I was able to figure out what was going on. The overtravel limits are wired in series with the estop circuit and there was no power going to the control from the limits to the console. Lookin at the limits I noticed that one of the limit switches was newer then the rest. Opened it up and sure enough someone wired it wrong. Two wires were backwards. Re connected to resolve this and bingo! It worked. The servo stays on.

    So everything works now! I have the manuals for the control and too some time to figure it out. Works. Only problem is is it uses a proprietory disk format and I cannot copy the software discs nor copy g-code to it to run. Thats leaves MDI and I figured out the editor on board and was able to get it to move with that.

    Great! It works but no tooling. I had been looking at the Tormach tooling system. Turns out someone on PractialMachinist.com got a new mill and o longer needed the set he had. So we stuck a deal and I bought his set. Then soon after that I ran across a Craigslist ad where a guy had a whole bunch of US made end mills brand new and wanted to trade it for an Oxy/Acet torch set. I had a spare so I traded it. All sorts of goodies. round nose, dovetail, round over and regular cutters. About $1300 worth!

    One of the reasons I bought this machine was I had one of the Hrbor Freight Micro Mills I converted to CNC. I finally bought a casting kit for a small gas engine but it was just too small. Now I have something to work on the engine!

    I was milling out some areas on the cylinder water jacket when the machine went crazy! The Y axis took off towards the column at about Warp 3. Luckily the control sensed this and shut everything down. But not after snapping off a new 1/4" round nose bit. And gouging the casting. Ouch!

    Well, it seems the servo card is messed up. It just gives ut 12v on the motor control no matter what. Went back to my friends place. He had gotten a spare control box for parts when he bought the machine. I have not gotten it from him as we didnt have room the day we moved it. i got the spare servo card and installed it. That seems to fix things up.

    I manage to finish the machining on the casting. Man this beats manually locating holes for drilling!

    I start playin with the machine trying to figure out how to get it to talk to another computer. It has RS-232 built in. Eventually I figure it out. Only problem is my floppys are failing. and there is no way to back up. Great now I have a good working controller with no operating system!

    Here are some more pics, including one of the mill this machine replaced.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails DSC02690.jpg   DSC02708.jpg   DSC02709.jpg   DSC02756.jpg  


  3. #3
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    I bought this machine intending on replacing the controller. Goetting the controller working was a bonus. I let me figure out how the system really worked. With this and the schematics I was sure I could convert the machine with minor modifiations to the controls.

    The machine has good servos and drives. No since in replacing them. I bought three of the $69 Pixies from http://www.skyko.com . These let you control servo drives with analog on with step/dir inputs. I also went to http://www.cnc4pc.com and bought two of bidirectional buffered breakout boards, one of the VFD controlboards, and one of the charge pump boards. Great boards. Only thing I didnt like is the mounting holes are all over the place!

    I went to back down to my friends surplus shop and picked up another 4 position opto22 G4 board for $25 w/modules. Also picked up some 4 wire and two wire shielded control cable and some snap in circuit board standoffs. While I was there I went ahead and yanked off the spare front panel for the console as well as the panel that has all the connectors that hook the control box to the console. After going back to pick up my card (oops) I also found a piece of aluminum to mount all of the interface boards on. When I got home I found some din rail, din mount relays and din mount terminal strips I had stripped out of an old machine.

    Here are some more pics showing the inside of the old console and the spare connector panel.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails DSC02722.jpg   DSC02725.jpg   DSC02728.jpg   DSC02730.jpg  

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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    I intend to use the existing cabinet as a home for the new controls. I took a piece of plywood and marked it to figure out the layout I wanted all of the boards and rails. Took out a pair of calipars and tarted getting dimensions and drew out a print. Took that piece of aluminum and cut it down to size on the table saw. The mill was still working, although very sluggish from all the disk errors and was able to use mdi to input all the hole locations. I flipped it over and counterbored the holes so the standoff would snap in.

    I decided the most out of the way place inside the cabinet would be right next to the conector panel. Since these boards will be wire to the connectors i decided to just tig weld the panels together. Of course I am out of Argon. And its Friday night... Ugh.

    Well, there is nothing more I need to make with the mill for the control so I go ahead and gut the console. Comes apart easily. They used connectors everywhere so no cutting needed. The original control also had provisions for controlling a variable speed spindle drive. Jut the wires were not hooked up in the console connector so I hooked up the wires and extended the signal wires with some of tht 2 strand shielded to reach the input of the vfd. I also seperated the overtravel limits so they were seperated and used some spare lines in the umbilical to the console to bring these signals up. These along with the home switches give a 24v dc signal to the console powered by a 24v linear power supply in the cabinet. I will isolate these signals with those little din rail mount relays.

    Finally its monday and I got another bottle of argon. Welded the panels together and drilled a couple holes where the wires will come in and split up amongst the boards. I had some wire trough so I put that in to keep everything in somewhat order. Installed all of the standoffs and boards and started wiring. All from the schematics and from my head. I has also earlier marked which wires I wanted to use from the connectors with tape.

    I guess it took about 2 hrs wire up. What a pain! But everything went well.
    For power to the board I need +5v, +12v, and -12V. The easiest thing to do is draw power off the ATX power supply for the computer. I picked up an ATX extension and attached a 4 pin connector to connect to the control panel. Doing this will eliminate the possibiity of ground loops.

    Now for the moment of truth. I installed the interface panel and hooked up the computer I had been using with the micro mill. I alread had Mach3 installed. i also had picked up a 15" kiosk style LCD panel off ebay that I plan on installing in the cabinet.

    I put of this together and powered her up. So far so good. All of the limits were activating the correct relays. All of the power lights were on. I hooked up a jumper that would activate the servos until I installed the board for the charge pump control. Immediately the servo took off for just a second an all of the pixies started blinking. Went into tune mode on the pixies and changed the output polarity. Now they work. I spend about an hour tuning the motors and they seem to work fine.

    I load up mach and enter the pin designations for the interface boards. i enter the steps per inch for the motors (50000 steps for X and Y and 166666.66 for Z, Later I use the built in step multiplier in the pixies to drop these levels. ) I also enter the parameters for the VFD control.

    It works! I go to MDI and enter 1 inch and it moves that! I also have full control of spindle speed and direction! I play around with motor setting and It seems to like rapids at about 100ipm which is pretty close to what the old control did.

    Heres some pics of the construction of the interface and the mess left over!
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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    Well, it seems to work pretty well. Two problems. One is the table oscilliates back and forth and the other is I just cant get tuned well so it overshoots.

    I took the scope and retuned the drives. No difference. Just too much backlash in the system. About .002". Not good.

    The problem lies in the feedback setup of the mill. The original setup used the LS303 Heidenhain Slides connected to EXE602 interpolators to give positional feedback to the console. I just cant get it tuned right to work like this. The only solution is to install rotary encoders on the motors themselves.

    i had bought three brand new 2500 lpr encoder about 5 years ago for an DRO project that went nowhere. I had some little zero backlash couplers and bored them out to fit the encoder and the 1/4" stub on the motor shaft. I used the mill to cut out the hole on the end of the coverplate on the motors. i just locktited the coupler to the shafts after I cut the shafts to length. Soldered on new lengths of 4 wire shielded cable and hooked these to the pixies.

    Now I could tune the motors. My signal gain was too high and I think that was causing my problems with the slide. Oh well, I will use the slides for DROs in Mach.

    Like I mentioned earlier the X and Y have about .002 backlash. Not only that the machine rumbles when it moves. I took a dial indicator and put a ball bearing ball in the centerhole at the end of the ball screw. I have about .001 end play. Looks like my bearings are shot. So I yanked the y axis motor mounts and sure enough, they felt pretty bad. They were made by Fafnir. Applied Industrial called up Fafnir for me and found out they were a brigeport part number. Called Bridgeport and ordered 4 bearings. Two showed up yesterday. Grr. Installed them and mde a heck of a difference. Dropped the backlash down to about .001. And made it so smooth!

    Also last night I went ahead and installed the board for the charge pump. Now when mach goes into estop it shuts down the servo system (Includes spindle and coolant pump).

    That brings this project up to date. I bought a jog pendant I am going to tie in to the system and am currently designing the new control panel. Need to call up Bridgeport and yell at them monday too.

    Couple more pics...
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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    828
    Nice machine and nice retro!!!
    Dennis

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158

    The saga continues...

    Got my second set of bearings. Bridgeport sent out the second set next day air. I installed the bearings and also changed the x drive belt while I had it apart. What a difference! The control consold no longer shakes when I rapid!

    Finally cut some steel with the mill. I got tired of my touchscreen moving away from me every time I go to push something so I cut a hole in the panel for it. I have been slowy designing my new control panel for the mill in solidworks. I exported it to a .dxf and popped it into lazycam and deleted everything except for the mounting holes and the hole for the LCD. I set up the panel in the mill, ran a couple air cuts to make sure everything is where they should be and then laid into it. Worked great, only I had the feedrate too high nd by the time I was done I had toasted the bit. Oh well...

    Now if only I had measured all four mounting holes to make sure they were the same distance apart. Who would of thought they would be 10" apart a 11" on the top?

    The touch screen is much easier to use now with it mounted rigidly. I am reusing a lot of the buttons from the old panel, many in their original location. I ordered a piece of aluminum today for the overlay to cover all the holes and the rough cut edges.

    When I was setting up the front panel I had a little accident. I crushed the reader head on my X axis Heidenhain slide. The overtravels were not working as I was still waiting for the second parallel port card. Anyone have a spare Heidenhain LS403?

    I found out the computer I picked just isnt going to hack it. i cant rapid a anything past the 35khz setting im mach without it jumping around. I have an old P4 2.4 SFF pc that I was going to use for another project. Its kind of like a shuttle PC. One PCI, One AGP and not much more. I had gone to urn it on a month or so ago and the power supply blew up. I called FIC about a new power supply and they wanted $65+ shipping. Forget that!

    I endup just getting a generic P4 ATX type power supply at goodwill for $2 nd set it on top of the machine. I got a dual port PCI card from ebay and installed that. Reinstalled windows and all the drivers and replaced the old computer. This made quite a difference. Not only can I run in the 45khz setting but going into wizards dosent kick in the driver watchdog. Also I can rapid much faster now. I was limited to about 120 ipm and now I can do 180 on X and 150 on Y.

    Now that I have the second parallel port installed I also have my home switches and overtravels working. The mill has some nice switches installed. So far they are totally repeatable and have hit the exact same spot everytime I have home the machine.

    I also hooked up the linear slides to the second port... Well, the two that are left... So far it looks like my Y axis is ending up where it should be withing a couple tenths everytime and I have about .0008" backlash. I also found out I had my Z setting way wrong! by 20%. I had thought the Z ball screw was .2" pitch like the others but it is actually .25 pitch. Also the Z screw is showing quite a bit of wear as it seems a little drunk. I will have to try the screwmapping and see if that helps.

    My next project is to add spindle feedback. I picked up some Keyence retroreflective fiber optic sensors that I am hoping to be able to pick off a mark on the spindle and get it to stop in a certian position to do the back boing canned cycles. Also to compensate for load while cutting.

    At this point the panel is mostly designed. The only thing I am waiting for is I need to come up with something to do mouse clicks. The toucscreen driver does have an option fot right clicks but does not work very well. I think i am just going to take a cheap mouse and gut it for the circuit board and mount some panel switches in place of the old switches.

    Here are a couple more pics of getting ready to cut the hole for the display and the finished prouct. Also a couple pics of the harmonic gear reducer I plan on using for a fourth axis. It has a 101:1 gear ratio and absolutely no backlash. I figured out the pinout for the encoder and now just need to hook it to a counter and figure out its ppr.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails DSC02759.jpg   DSC02771.jpg   DSC02760.jpg   DSC02761.jpg  


  8. #8
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    Last week my motherboard in the little computer I was going to use died. I guess when the power supply blew it took out the motherboard as well. It seems the RAM and CPU are still good so I picked up a AsRock socket 478 motherboard new for $52. In cut a old desktop case in half front to back and installed the board and power supply. Reinstalled XP and everything seems to work good. I am going to scavenge parts out of the old SFF computer to hold the CD-ROM, hard drive, and smart card reader.

    I am also looking into installing flood coolant. The base of the machine was originally designed to be used as a sump. I had some worries as the copper air line leading to the air assisted ball screw. I pulled off the cover off the base and stuck my digital camera in there and took a couple blind photos. I found that they has driller right through the wall of the sump. Ouch. And not only only one hole but three! I raised and locked the knee and removed the knee ballscrew. I yanked the old copper line cleaned out the holes with some spray degreaser. I then used some rubber well nuts and installed them in place with a bunch of silicone and tightened them up. I let them sit a while and then put a nice layer of silicone over that. I dont think coolant will get through that!

    Since I had the ballscrew cylinder apart I took it apart since I had been hearing air leaking. I found the piston had came loose from the rod/screw and air was escaping through it. I totally cleaned the ballscrew and found aluminum chips in the nut so I pulled that apart as well. The nut is pretty worn. Looks like it will need replacing eventually. I cleaned it out and reloaded the balls and reassembled everything. I added a thin ship between the inner races of the angular contact bearing of the nut/pulley to increase the preload and to compensate for wear. I replaced the air fitting on the bottom to the pushlock type poly line connector and drilled holes to bring the air line out the side of the base along the side to the regulator in back. It moves smoother without all the chips in in the screw nut!

    Got a little more done on the mill this weekend. The replacement scale for the one I crushed came in on friday. I picked up a similar model and was able to use my old long scale with the new reader head. The only difference was the new head output in ttl quadrature instead of the sinusoidal quadrature that the old head output in . Plus the new head was a fixed 10X mulitplication out. This gives me 50800 divisions per inch over the old 25400. A little overkill...

    Not wanting to cut up cables I made a jumper that connects between the header connectors in the Heidenhain interpolator boxes. Works good. Though when I went o home the X axis would randomly stop thinking it hit the home switch. Eventually I figured out there was some crosstalk from the encoder on the X axis that was tripping the X home input. I moved the input to the other parallel port and the problem disappeared.

    I found out Mach cannot stop a spindle at a certain location. No big deal. So I just went with doing normal closed loop spindle control. Initially I tried using the keyence sensors to sense the edges of the fan blades but the pulse time was just too short. I then made a 4 sector encoder wheel in corel and glued it to the fan on the spindle motor. I still could not get a stable signal into mach. It would work fine up to about 1000 rpm and then loose the signal from the sensor. I initially though it was the Opto22 input module that I used to interface to the 5v logic could not handle the rise/fall times. I put a scope on the output of the Opto22 and found I was getting a good signal out. It turns out that again I was getting some crosstalk. This time from the step signal going to my VFD control. It was scrambling the signal going into the computer. I moved it to the other parallel port card and now I have a stable signal to the computer. I ran the spindle calibration routine sucessfully and enabled closed loop spindle control. Now if I put a load on the spindle it will compensate and maintain spindle speed. The next trick is to make a pickoff right off the quill. This way I dont have to do any calculations for ratios due to different selection in the varidrive.

    My current plan to do this is to cut out a disc out of 1/4" aluminum and drill a hole radially through the edge and insert one of the fiber sensors. I will then make up a linear encoder strip which I will wrap around the quill for a 2 or 4 segment encoder. The disc with the sensor will mount to the quill cap. If this works I will make a more permanent encoder strip or may just paint it right on the quill.

    Next project is to make up a drip/chip tray for the base for when I start to use flood coolant. I have a electrical panel cover from an old promass board loader that is almost perfect for that. I marked it out last night and will take the plasma cutter to it tonight and make it fit. I have a couple holes to plug up when some of the controls were also.
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  9. #9
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    I got the chip tay made u as well. Used the plasma cutter to cut out the pieces I didnt want then mig welded them together. First time I got to use my new to me Powcon 300SM. Nice job. all I had was CO2 and no splatter even with that. Now just need to drill a few mounting holes to bolt it down and and paint it up.

    Also a pic of the new computer.
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  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jan 2007
    Posts
    93
    Nice
    How did you connect those 3 100 pixies and bidirectional buffered breakout boards?Are they connected together?
    I have a plan to make the same CNC control maschine.
    Is this mashine build,that can not losing stepps?
    I would like to contact with you by email.You can send me answers to [email protected]

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    You just hook the step/direction lines to the pixies as you would hook up a stepper driver. You can download the manuals for the pixies from http://www.skyko.com

    Is is somewhat of a closed loop system. More so then with steppers. You really wont stall out the motors without tripping either the motor controllers overload protection or the pixies senses too much of a lag in motor position to where it should be. At cutting speeds the lag will not be noticeable but you need to adjust it for rapids. If the pixies sense too much of an offset then they will error out and shut down the drive. You can tie this into the estop circuit so that when it errors it shuts down the machine.

    So far my machine has been working pretty good.

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Sep 2006
    Posts
    24
    Hi Macona
    Can I ask what make you pick PIXIES 100 over GECKO 320? The reason I ask because, I am about to purchace a used cnc system power by glentek,the same that in your supermax.
    Also what the reason you upgrade to the pixie, and why not used the old controller, ie glentek system? how about upload some video?

    Thanks
    calvin
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  13. #13
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    Well, it been over a month since I last made an update. In that time I have:

    •Added a bijur spray-mist system

    •Added a little giant pump into the sump and made some perforated grates for coolant return. Plumbed in the pump and wired it up to the controller. Connected it to locline.

    •Replaced the Knee Z axis ballscrew with a rebuilt ground screw. Old screw nu was worn and it was a rolled screw so I was having accuracy problems. Had to borrow a lathe as my lathe dosnt have a big enough through hole.

    •Cut out the control panel on the mill. Powder Coated it and use water slide decals for lettering and transparencies for the buttons. There buttons to put the three pixies in setup mode and reset them, Cycle start and stop buttons, computer power and reset. Also Mounted the CD-rom and card reader+usb to the panel, Hole for pendant, 4th axis connection, e-stop, small led meter for spindle power current. I also took apart a PS2 mouse and installed it through the panel to give me panel mounted left/right mouse click plus scroll wheel/center click. Still need to do some wiring and make a circuit board to control the button lights and switch the serial port between the pixies.

    •Added spindle feedback sensor. Used a Keyence retroreflective fiberoptic sensor to pick up directly from the quill. Took a but of playing with but eventually got it working.

    All in all its mostly done and working pretty darn good. Been making chips today and breaking bits. I have been using a air powered jig boring spindle to run some 1/16" and 1/32" carbide bits. Works pretty well but sucks the air. Ran in one problem today, the machine was locking up on me. I think the computer was overheating in the cabinet. Today was the warmest day in the shop since I had sealed up the enclosure with the control paned overlay.Looks like I will have to add a fan and couple vents.

    Some other things I want to do is make up and enclosure to keep chips and coolant within the mill. Also want make a tool changer of some sort using the tormach tool system. i have seen a small system for the mini-mill and I think I can use the basic design. I will make up a new drawbar for the spindle and use bellville washers to put the collet under tension. I have a small multi stage air cylinder that will do the trick to release it.

    Still need to make the 4th axis. Got the cast iron for the table. Waiting for a face mill to get started.
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  14. #14
    Join Date
    Sep 2006
    Posts
    24
    Hi Jerry

    I just wonder, can you clear something up for me?

    1- Your servo system, is it AC or DC ?
    2- Can you post some pics show the connection between PIXIE to GLENTEK?

    3- This is what I understand what you did so far PIXIE to GLENTEK

    Thanks for helping me out...
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails glentek.JPG  

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    DC Servos.

    Nope cant post any more pics than are already here since the servo drives are in a separate cabinet than the pixies. But you got it right in the drawing. One thing is I am powering the pixies and the interface boards with the computers power supply.

  16. #16
    Join Date
    Sep 2006
    Posts
    24
    Hi Jerry
    Can you still use Those Heidenhain Digital Readout with MACH 3?
    Thanks
    Calvin

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    You can use them as a DRO, but you need to install encoders on the shaft for the pixies. The problem I have found is that at 25400 lines per inch the parallel port cant accurately pick up the signals when rapiding. Its fine at slower speeds and is great to adjust your backlash settings. But other than that they are pretty useless. I had though use them as a DRO for manual machining but I have yet to ever use it manually. If I dont want to write a program or cad the part then I just use MDI. Then its like a manual mill with powered axis's. Also you dont want to run a mill with ball screws manually. You can loose control easily if you are climb milling.

  18. #18
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    I have been having problems with tooling and collets getting stuck in the taper on my mill (R8). Took a peek up inside there and found that the taper is all pitted. I took a new collet and marked it up with a sharpie and inserted it with a tool in it. Its only grabbing at the taper. Wells Index offers a spindle regrind service for $100 plus shipping. They got it yesterday (Thurs 3/1) and Shipped it back to me the next day. I should get it next week.

    While the quill is out I took the opportunity to clean up the head since it was mostly apart. It was a mess. Old hardened grease and grime and the filler on the castings was starting to come loose. So I disassembled it as far as I could and soaked everything in a bucket of toluene. This got rid of the old grease and oil so I took the die grinder with a scotchbrite wheel and sanded down all the filler smooth. Then went ahead and repainted it machinery grey.

    Came out pretty good, Not as smooth as before but at least its not flaking off filler. Looks a lot better than it did before. Now I just have to wait for the spindle to show up.

    Something has been bugging me about the machine. With the size of motors on it I should be getting more than the 150ipm I am getting. With the old control I was getting about 200 ipm before the control could not keep up. So I figure its time to retune it. Eventually I found that lowering the P Gain value on the pixies to one and then turn the gain on the amp up to where it starts to sing and back off half a turn makes it really happy. I now have maxed out Mach3 45khz limit. I can move the mill in X and Y at 270 IPM! Thats at .0001 resolution. Z is slower at 150 ipm because it is geared down more. That and it has a whole bunch more to move than X and Y.

    I also ordered a Gecko G100 Grex. I cant wait to see what a difference this makes!

    Since the mill was moving so good I figured I had better check out my lube system. Good thing I did. One of the flow restrictors was in backwards and since it has a check valve oil was not getting to the back of the knee. And the same connection on the other side is messed up so I need to repair that as well.

  19. #19
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    Well, its been a few months since I last posted. Got my spindle back quickly and it is much better.

    Also got my Grex and installed it.

    I cant say I am totally happy with it. Maybe as the plugin moves further along it will make me happier but not yet. It is nice to have all the inputs and output and my mill now travels 400 ipm rapid on x and y and Z is still limited to about 100 to 120 ipm. Thats at 50000 steps per inch on x and y and 133333 on Z. not bad.

    I really miss my spindle feedback though. As it sits I really have no clue how fast the spindle is turning. Also the grex has some goofy analog outs. really sensitive to the kind of load you put it on. Had to do all sorts of experimentation to get it to work decently with my VFD. Ended up setting it to work on a current loop instead of voltage.

    Finally got all of the buttons on the front panel wired up too.

    This last weekends project was to add a quick release system for the collet. A standard impact based power drawbar just wont work right since I use the tormach tool system for most of my milling. It just needs to loosen the collet a bit for the tool holder to come out. I have an old PCB router spindle that uses a collet that looks like a mini r8 (2VB) and it uses an air cylinder to push in the drawbar that is held in tension by belleville washers. I have a spare cylinder I just copied the design. The cylinder is a 4 stage 3" pistons, 3/16" stroke. At 100 PSI it can push about 2800 lbs!

    I modified the spring loaded base to a clamp configuration and made an adapter plate to fit the top of the mill and the old mounting holes on the clamp. Attached a solenoid valve and did some rewiring. Added a Box to the front of the head with buttons to control the valve and another estop button.

    Works great. Hit one button and the collet releases, hit the other it closes. I also removed the index pin from the quill so I can unscrew the collet when the collet is released and screw in other tooling. The bellevilles give the draw bar somewhere around 600 to 800 lbs of pull as far as I can figure. It will also be set up so the computer can control the solenoid as well.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails DSC02908.JPG   DSC02909.JPG  

  20. #20
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    158
    Heres some video of it actually doing something. The first one is a fixture to hold a ger so I could treppan it for a cam in a small engine I am building. Second is starting to mill the gear itself. Nozzle is a Bijur Spray Mist system.

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...91113110&hl=en

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...00838466&hl=en

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