Excel Pinnacle vertical mill

[BluePinnacle]

Height - 7 feet, spindle - 4hp, 415v 3ph, 4200 RPM max expanding sheave drive and automatic airbrake, 3x 10 amp stepper drives, routout stepper driver, microstepping to 32,000 steps per inch. Maximum X,Y speed - 1200 mm/minute and of course Mach3 running on an old 950MHz PC with two parallel cards.

Note to self - more pictures required! it's quite a big beast. The first two pictures are of the twin-jet travelling coolant system I made up. I'm cutting large parts on two fixtures with a significant variation in Z offsets, and the static feed was either missing the tool or getting spun off the chuck and vapourising all over the floor.





It works a treat, I'd like a lot more pressure but that'll mean making a new coolant pump as the old one gets tired, bless it. 10-15PSI at the nozzle would be good! The clamp is a giant 85mm hose clamp, and the jets are now angled at 45 and 225 degrees to X so that on normal X or Y oriented cuts the coolant flow is approximately the same.

More photos when I remember!

[Hood]

Looks like a nice machine, whats the travels? Whats the taper?
Hood

[BluePinnacle]

Hi. X around 750mm, Y around 400mm, Z around 180mm (set a bit low so i don't knock the coolant pipe off).

More pictures:


Front - with TFT display and hardware control panel. The guards are less than wonderful, really they just prevent coolant going absolutely everywhere ( they constrain it to "nearly everywhere   ")


Backside - the white boxes are for contactors, LPT interface boards and other trickery. The RoutOut stepper driver and PC are on the steel framed shelf to the right.


Front hardware control panel for locking out the brake and running the pneumatic drawbar. The spindle can also be disabled and safely reenabled from here, all done with relay logic. The whole thing is completely fail-safe.


Current 2-jig setup making WG5Q flanges for coupling waveguide sections. The twin fixtures enable angles flanges to be made by tilting the first fixture, then finishing off on the second jig.


My lovely twin-jet coolant feed doing its thing. it's such an improvement over the old "gooseneck" feed!


Product! A complete WG5Q flange from 15mm thick 6082 alloy. Complete cycle time is 20 minutes dead, no tool changes.

[budman68]

Looks like it makes some beautiful chips, there.

A very productive looking setup and I'm envious - 

Dave

[edvaness]

bluepinnacle,

Looks like my Yamazen Mill.

Ed

[N4NV]

bluepinnacle,

Looks like my Yamazen Mill.

Ed

I also have a Yamazen that I converted and they are very similar.  Even the limit switches are the same, but the Yamazen came with servos.

Vince

[edvaness]

N4NV,

My Yamazen has dc 4 brush  Baldor servos. Good rigid machine. Got mine really cheap.
  Was going to be scrapped. works great (now)

Ed

[BluePinnacle]

Hi. Could be that the Yamazen mill is based on the same castings, and the electrical & control systems fitted by different companies. It's fairly common with machine tools, I believe. Does the Yamezen have plastic slide surfaces?

[N4NV]

My Yamzen came with an Allen Bradley control with Servo Dynamics drives and 4 brush servo motors.  Mine did not have plastic (Teflon) on the sliding surfaces.  I wrote up the Mach conversion here:
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31601

Vince

[BluePinnacle]

that's a VERY sexy conversion and I'm in considerable envy of the travel speed. I must see if I can snag a faster computer for my rig, mine seems rather limited in terms of the speed of the pulse train it can generate. Well done, great job there