[SEK22Hornet]

Ok - a little background - When I bought this machine (Ajax DM45-NC) a few years ago, it had a problem where once in a while the spindle would just shut down mid program. The Direction control output from the Servo3IO board and the analog speed control voltage would just drop out - no errors - the drives would keep running sometimes breaking the cutter before i could hit something to shut it down - feed stop, tool check or E stop. Restarting the program would reset everything and the machine might run for quite a while before doing it again. It got less and less frequent and i thought the problem may have gone away until today. I go to fire up the mill - it seems to take a while to boot up and I see something I have not seen before - a message telling me the guard is open. There are no guards - no limit switches, etc on this machine. I homed fine and I went to set part 0. I usually spin the spindle at a few hundred rpm when touching off the part 0 - I immediately got a Feed Stop red box, the Feed Stop LED lit up and teh spindle would not turn on manually. Finally got that cleared and tried to run a program to see what would happen - as soon as it gets to M03, it tells me to set the spindle to auto - when I do, I get the Feed Stop red box again. So - at this point I'm trying to see what is causing this - the voltages on the outputs tell me that the inverter is not being told to turn on - direction input both at 5 volts and analog output at 0 volts - speed on the screen shows 0. This setup uses fiber optic cables to connect the Servo3IO to the PCI board in the PC. It also has an RS232 plug that converts the signal to fiber optics - I have read that this cable carries the control requests for the spindle speed control - anyone know anything about this set up?
Any help with this machine would be greatly appreciated!

Dan

[cnctechml]

Dan,

Please generate a current report from that system following the attached tech bulletin and email it to [email protected]. Thanks.

[SEK22Hornet]

Got a reply back from Centroid tech after sending the report - the guard open message was shutting off the spindle. That is input #3 on the controller. There are no guards on this machine - not even limit switches or homing switches - did find a wire connected to input three - have not tried to trace it out yet - it was holding input #3 at ground. Disconnected it and the spindle now runs. There was some automated fixturing on the mill at one time for a previous owner - I'm thinking the wiring was disconnected somewhere and just left hanging - may have finally grounded out. Seems like it is going to run again now.