[buckie555]

I'm retrofitting a cincinnati VMC which currently has a very tired acramatic 850 control. I'm planning on using a Mach3 GREX combination with fluxeon drives for the axis'. The spindle motor is a fanuc ac servo motor (10kW) controlled by a fanuc spindle board.

For those in the know the spindle drive is circa 1992 type A06B-6059-H212
and has a wave shaper board A06B-6059-C212. It also has a spindle orientation board on it.

What I'm looking for is any information that details how I can interface to this drive. In an ideal world I would be able to feed it an analog signal proportional to the required spindle speed but I suspect that this won't be the case. I'm exepcting it to have lots of handshaking with the current control that will need to be addressed but I would love to be proven wrong. I've got microprocessor experience and am ready for a challenge. If anyone has any schematics or manuals or pinouts etc I would be very grateful for the info. I would be more than happy to pay for any good info/manuals etc. So far fanuc have been less than helpful and the machine surplus sites I've contacted have responded with the standard "dunno mate".

Also if anyone has any better ideas of driving the fanuc spindle motor, perhaps with a vfd? or knows of a relatively cheap (less than $600) drive that would fit the bill I would be very interested to hear. I would be very happy to move away from the fanuc drive to avoid being at the mercy of the excessively high surplus prices for fanuc in 3 years time when the drive packs up mid production. Also, although the motor is rated at 10kW I don't need all that power for the machine's new life and so would consider a 5kW or so drive system.


I had considered replacing the motor with a large induction motor and driving it with a vfd but I'm keen to keep the fanuc spindle servo motor because it's in good condition and I want full coordinated movement to allow me to do things like rigid tapping and align the spindle for tool changes.

I would be particularly interested to hear from anyone that has attempted something similar in the past.

I'm open to suggestions however wacky so please chip in.

Thanks in advance,

Neil

[baden0001]

buckie, have you had any luck with your retrofit?

Did the fluxeon drives work for your fanuc servos? Where I work is looking to do something similar with a 2 axis indexer to allow a machine to become five axis. The indexer is fitted with fanuc AC servos.

We looked into purchasing items from Fanuc to control the servos with a powermate or Fanuc PLC. Now we are exploring more to give us more options.

Good luck with your project.

Baden

[pateltechnomati]

I am also working on similar project ..fanuc spdl motor eurotherm 620 vector drive ,i observe that motor can run with this drive but it require feedback from motor shafa and i dont know my fanuc ac spindle motor encoder detail ,i am working on this issue once finish i will inform u if u have encoder detail for this motor please tell me

[baden0001]

pateltechnomati,

A while ago I contacted FANUC about the encoder. They said the encoder is serial and the information that is output is propietary.

So no luck unless the serial stream is hacked.

Baden