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Thread: Updating an old lathe

  1. #11
    Many CNC machines use floppy drives. You can still buy them and I suspect it's for that reason they are still available.

    I updated my 2004 Mill to a USB transfer system and haven't looked back. I hated floppies.

  2. #12
    Davros, Thanks lol yea I am practically useless when it comes to computers. I would have just uninstalled the linux completely because I havent a clue about it but I know that linuxcnc is supposed to be much better then mach is for lathes especially and would like to mess with it one day after I get the mach lathe running.

    Dayspring, Simon is completely right moest of the files that are going into this lathe being plug ins or codes are very small files, all the gcode is a simple text file that needs to be massive to get into the megabyte range. I still have some old programs that were converted to floppy from a magnetic tape which was one of the ways that this machine would read or record code from originally. It also had a dot matrix printer port to print out code and images of the tool path, neat for the time laughable now.

    I have a ton of usb interfaces going on with this lathe now.

    No idea what happened to my last update but here is the newest one.

    Got the vistacnc pendant in and it is a very nice product. Wired the steppers together, I seen how they were wired in the bus bar and just assumed that the black and brown wires should still be on the outside, was just a guess. I then plugged them in black, green/yellow stripe, blue, brown. I tried to cycle the stepper and it would go one direction and then go back a little. So i decided to check continuity between the black wire and the green/yellow wire, there was none... So i checked between black and blue and got the beep noise on my tool so I switched the blue and green/yellow wires and boom it works as it should.

    A few questions now
    I have no idea how many steps I need per inch or mm or whatever mach has. Should I put a dial gauge along the side and jog it once to see where it lands then calc out to see how many steps I need per inch? Also I know the machine was set as a metric standard so I am assuming the ball screws are metric pitched as well, should I keep with that or convert it to inches because everything I do is in inches for the most part.

    I hope to tune the steppers in tomorrow then hopefully get the spindle under control from mach tomorrow as well. Then the next step would be the limit switches which are an entirely different animal


    (new pendant and my touch keyboard/mouse pad pretty cool little $15 gadget)

    (Wiring to the soldered connector. I have the covers and everything to complete the vga connectors and will do it as I mount the box and computer into the cabinet)

    (all three plugged in temporarily)

    A short video of the z and x axis moving.

  3. #13
    Another update for the day.

    It took a long time with my process but I got the motors tuned in!!! Basically I knew the phase angle on my steppers but that is really it, I did not know how many steps per rotation they were or what pitch my ball screws were running so I was going at it blind. What I did was set up a dial gauge on a magnetic base and just picked 20000 steps per inch and set my jog to 0.005" to see what I would get. I was getting over 0.01" of movement so I cut it in half to 10000 steps per inch and got a little under 0.005" so I went for 12000 and got closer so I just went up and down a bunch until I found a happy step amount to get an accurate reading.

    I took a video of the z axis before I got it completely tuned in. I did the x axis later. I am sure I can get a little more accuracy out of it using a 0.0001" gauge but I will do that if I run a few parts and are unhappy with the tolerances I am getting. The steps per inch is a strange number because the ball screw has to be metric, its like 10.309something rotations per inch and I dont know the steps per revolution of the motors.




    (final tuned steps per inch, The ipm speed and accel are very conservative because I didnt want to whip the thing around while trying to tune it in, I had it humming at around 100ipm a little faster and I was shaking the stand which I might try and support a little more if I want more rapid.)

  4. #14
    Wayne
    Join Date
    Apr 2012
    Location
    Vail, AZ
    Posts
    370
    Great updates. I have Mach3 that I use on my mini CNC. It was a very uncomfortable beginning for me because I was worried about doing something wrong/messing something up. After a little bit of tinkering and running a few parts, I'm much more comfortable. I am finding that I have to keep my movements very conservative because of the open loop system. Every few jobs I re-home just to be sure. I don't have limit switches on mine. The Z it always fine, so I just tell that to go home, but the X and Y have been off a few thou in the past. Since getting a better chip clearing method, that hasn't been a problem though. Baby steps for me and now It's enjoyable.

  5. #15
    DesertT1, I run mach on my tormach as well. I felt the same it is a bit of a buggy program so I tend to go conservative on the first pass and try and adjust it as I go if I am doing a small part run just in case it decides to get a little crazy. I am used to it now so I decided to do it on the lathe as well. The open loop thing isnt all that bad if your not pushing it enough to lose a step, the smooth stepper boards that is on my lathe is a good way to make sure you dont lose any microsteps electronically as well I also rehome after a few parts as well, There is always some kind of backlash loss and in the case of my tormach the spindle head grows around 0.002 if I have been running it for a few hours.


    Small update.

    I got the spindle motor running off mach now. Thankfully I asked a member over at cnczone how he wired the g540 to the kbmg-212d, that I have, and he quickly showed me what I was doing wrong and boom I have a working spindle off mach. Of course there is no tach on it yet so I first tried to adjust the ratio on the pulley screen and it did nothing to my spindle speed, not sure why. So instead I just adjusted my max speed to get myself in a decent range. Of course I assume I will only take my machine to 3kish rpms so I made 1500 rpms pretty close and watch it dip a little as I go slower and go a little faster as I speed it up. I am planning on getting a tach on the spindle before I attempt anything like threading so I am pretty happy with where its going. I made a video but forgot to show the spindle stopping which it does very nicely and quickly now. Also I put the speed up to around 3500 rpm and didnt record that either. Got some real neat vibrations from that speed its a little to fast.


    (picture of the motor drive with the 10v power supply on the power strip that goes into the g540 (hot to pin 9, neutral to pin 7), the common is shared between the g540 (pin 7) and the kbmg-212d common which is what I was having problems with originally trying to spin it. The signal line is coming directly from the vfd out on the g540 (pin8), eventually when I have everything getting pretty I will make a switch to switch between potentiometer and mach control, I also need to wire in an ammeter as well on that side.


    (wiring on the g540 side)

    Small video of the motor spinning


    I want to run a small simple part to see how everything is going under load next then I plan to start putting everything in its place and doing the real wiring that is a little neater and starting to wire up the old proximity switches, which is a bit of a daunting task to me right now... Planning on turning down one of my old bobbed valves with it, have it coded through hsmworks already for fanuc turning which is very similar especially without any tool changes involved.
    Last edited by Florypb505; 09-05-2014 at 12:08 PM.

  6. #16
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    Nov 2014
    Posts
    2
    Last edited by jacob; 11-13-2014 at 04:39 AM.

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