Heh, nope, the axes drive has no phase detection. All I had to do was move the connection to the transformer that supplies the low voltage for the logic control to a phase terminal that I was going to supply, and it fires up and works fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vok0GHZB8h0
The Phase Perfect essentially does the exact same thing the axes drive, or spindle drive already does. It takes 1 phase AC and rectifies it to DC, then uses IGBTs to generate 3 phase AC from the DC bus. Why do I need to start at 1 ph 240VAC, convert to DC, convert to 3 phase AC (inside the Phase Perfect), then convert to DC again, and convert back to 3 phase AC (in the spindle / axes drive)? Every time you convert, the efficiency goes down. The phase perfect has a DC bus in the middle, and so does the spindle and axes drive! If anything, I'll add more capacitors to the DC bus, if I ever have problems with the bus voltage falling under load.
The only thing actually in the machine the really needs 3 phase is the coolant pump, and I'll just get a cheap VFD to run that. It's not a very big motor, and It's going to be quite a while before I'm ready for coolant anyways.
The one problem I have now is the regenerative breaking in the spindle drive is not happy, because my fake phase pulses aren't actually aligned with the incoming power. Well, maybe spindle bearings too - I'm no expert, but they sound a bit on the rattly side!
Can the Phase Perfect deal with the spindle drive shoving power back to "the (virtual) line" for breaking? How much is a 50A or 70A (at single phase 240V) Phase Perfect going to set me back? I paid next to nothing for the machine, relatively speaking. It cost more in forklifts and trucks to move it than the actual machine itself. All told, machine and moving cost much less than I've seen people sell bridgeports for on craigslist! I got it cheap because the spindle drive was pretty damaged and completely dead when I got it. Frankly, not many people would've been able to diagnose and repair it to get it running at all, so I'm not too afraid of a challenge / having to replace a couple more IGBTs if something goes awry! I can probably buy a ton of replacement IGBTs for the cost of the Phase Perfect!
I see a couple of solutions:
1) Align my fake phase pulse generation I'm feeding into the drive with the actual phase of the input AC. Experiment with unequal phase pulses (if the drive will allow that) to better align the fake "3 phase" 120 degree separated pulses with the real 180 phase difference between my actual split phase 240VAC. At first I didn't get why they had 6 pulse channels in the phase detection, but now I see it's so they know when to switch on which IGBTs in the "regenerative" side of the drive to dump power from the DC bus back to the line when the motor is breaking. Makes total sense!
OR
2) Replace "the line" on the regenerative converter side of my drive with a breaking resistor (aka, stove element), like a Haas spindle controller (and probably lots of others) use. Then the timing of the phase detection pulses and the line voltage doesn't matter. Basically just end up with 6 IGBTs dumping the excess power to the resistor (heat), rather than trying to be fancy and shove it back to the line.