1979 Takisawa DTX-1 Turret Lathe

[PROTOPLANT]

Yes, they are Viper 200's.  So far so good, the motors were way too big for Geckos, I've had problems with those faulting all the time on larger systems ( I run the knee with one on my mill, and I've done a few other projects).  The vipers seem like nice drives so far, very configurable and I found them to be not too bad to setup.  But I've had a lot of experience with PID servo stuff.  Hope they work well in the long run!


Dustin

[PROTOPLANT]

John, THanks for the comments, they are the original motors with Viper drives.  I did not want to get into making the old Fanuc stuff work.  It all ran off of 460VAC and looked kind of old and scary :-)  It also took up about 2 cubic feet of panel...

The vipers are working great so far, but I have yet to cut metal with them.  I would've replaced the motors with AC systems, but they have really special tapered shafts for the zero-backlash drive gears, I didn't want to figure out how to connect them.

DUstin

[cnc-it]

Sounds a neat solution. I presume you have encoders on the motors and not tachos? Was it hard to get the Vipers working well with the large sevos?

I have an '84 Hitachi Seiki 4NE11 very similar in size/spec to the Takisawa. It has Fanuc 6TA on it with yellow cap DC motors..a 20m for the Z axis and 5M for the X axis..Like you say those DC drives are not small!

John. 

[PROTOPLANT]

Hi John,

So far the Vipers have been behaving well.  It is a little tricky to get everything hooked up properly, like the phase of the encoder and motor polarity, etc, but once it is all figured out they seem to work very well.  The motors are Gettys Fanuc, and have 2000 line differential encoders. 

If your drives, or "amplifiers" are working well, you may consider some sort of out-of-Mach motion control board.  I've heard there are some that just get commands from Mach and close the encoder loop etc all in hardware.  Not an expert here, and I knew Mach works pretty well at motion control so I went the digital drive route.

Dustin