[panozeng]

On Monday I was visiting my favorite scrapyard looking for more linear drive components for the 2' x 3' starter gantry I was starting to put together when I found this:


It was in a machine that was being cut up with a cutting torch as I walked up! Turns out it came out of a local transmission manufacturer's assembly line, and was used to squirt the sealant on the housings as they moved down the line. You can see the blue Hylomar on the injector in that pic. I helped them unbolt the part pictured above (they wanted to cut it out for me!) and bought all 90lbs of it for 50 cents a pound!

It is a Sankyo Seiki cartesian coordinate robot made up as follows:
X axis - THK 46 series KR linear rail and ballscrew assembly & 267 watt AC servo motor:


Y axis - THK 33 series KR linear rail and ballscrew assembly & 118 watt AC servo motor:


Z axis - 5" travel on linear rails, pnuematically actuated

Since I had a stepper drive and a couple of spare nema 23 steppers I mounted them in place of the servos. I believe they are 175ozin or somewhere around there. They were pretty easy to get mounted.

Because I got a killer deal on it I have a Microkinetics Driverack system, which is a control box that includes a USB interfaced motion control board, dual 80volt 10 amp power supplies, dual 10amp microstepping drivers, and a breakout board for all the limit switches and outputs. The MK software is horrible, but it does kind of work. I am going to start a separate thread in the main Plasma board explaining why you don't want this software and hardware...

Anyway, I made a simple tabletop table last night (I'm a welding instructor at a college) and got it all set up today. Oh - the plasma cutter is an Esab Powercut 1500 90 amp unit. Anyway, considering how bad the control system is I was able to get some decent first cuts!

Here is a 3.5" diameter circle cut in 1/8" steel at 400ipm and 80 amps. The cut was surprisingly clean; there was no cleanup before this pic:


And the bottom:


Finally, you can see a short video of the machine cutting 16 ga steel here:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYMOV5dB_gc"]YouTube- MVI_1293.AVI[/ame]

[Mike Nash]

I'm impressed with everything about this. $45 bucks, in the nick of time, 5 day build, and that thing flies!

[Weldtutor]

A fine looking machine.

Amazing what treasures some "scrap" yards have.

Nice little video!

[Al Lowe]

Wow, I don't think anything on that machine could be bought for $45 new.

Anyway, good job getting it to run.

[scobob]

What a coincidence. I started probing some of our production engineers to see if there was any machine components going up for scrap. The previous day the Sankyo Cartesian machine below was placed on the scrap list and turns out the asset owner was a friend of mine in an office 20 feet away. Even more coincidentally the engineer who built it turned out to be my best man! He scrapped it for me and now I just have to figure out how to get this beast home. 4 in welded steel table and 1/2" aluminum top flat to .001 ! Total cost will be a couple cases of beer for friends to help me move it and 4 casters capable of carrying the weight of this monster.





Congratulations on your find! Can't wait to get mine going.

[panozeng]

What did yours do originally? What are you going to make it do now? Did you get any of the control system?

[scobob]

The machine was used in a clean room to apply epoxy to some membrane material. The controller is a proprietary Sankyo SC3000 Controller which may be a problem. It has 4 optical encoder servos. It was considered 4-axis but rather than a rotational axis, the servo was used used to drive a LS and apply the epoxy in very controlled amounts. I'm planning on adding a router or spindle haven't decided yet. I'll post more pics when I start the conversion.