Machsupport Forum
General CNC Chat => Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) => Topic started by: PROTOPLANT on October 29, 2009, 01:00:15 AM
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Hi All,
Just wanted to post some images of the lathe I have been working on for the last few months! It still needs lots of love, but it is coming along.
Thanks for looking!
Dustin
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That is a nice looking chunk of iron you've got there Dustin.
Good mass ...... looks very rigid.
I'd like to find something similar.
Keep us posted of your progress.
Thanks,
RC
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Looks nice, please keep us posted.
I have a Mori Seiki SL1 I plan to retrofit someday and I could use your knowledge learned on this build for sure !
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Nice looking lathe :)
Is the tailstock powered? Wish mine had a powered tailstock, its on the todo list but need to find a ballscrew long enough and cheap enough first ;)
What swing and bore does it have?
Hood
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Thanks for the comments all, I will try to keep posting comments/pics as it comes along.
Hood, The tailstock is powered, hydraulic. It has ~ 3in of stroke. I am not exactly sure how it all works yet, but you can basically set the force with a pressure regulator and then run the hydraulics with a solenoid valve.
It will swing 20in over the bed, and there is a 10in gap at the chuck where it could swing something huge, not sure how big. There is a 2in spindle hole, but with the hydraulic chuck actuator installed it is 1.625.
Thanks you all for looking!
Dustin
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The hydraulics you mention, do they move the tailstock along the bed or are you just meaning the quill? Mine has hydraulic quill but it is manually positioned and clamped on the bed.
I originally had a closed center Hyd chuck on mine but I need through spindle for the work I do and was going to get an open center chuck but it would have reduced the bore down to about 2.5 inch which is too small for some of the shafts I do, so I just have a manual chuck. Its no big deal for me because I don't do mass production, most of my work is one offs.
Turret looks nice, like the 8 positions, mine is only six and a front toolpost with 4 positions, going to replace the front post with another 6 pos turret though :)
Hood
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Hi Hood,
Yea, they just move the quill, I figured you meant you wanted to move the whole thing after I thought about it awhile, getting a long enough ball screw for the quill would probably not be a problem :-)
Sounds like your spindle has a big thru-hole! That would be nice for lots of stuff. This guy is mostly going to be making pulleys for my other company www.altmount.com, we make serpentine belt kits for boat engine alternators. I am really looking forward to having a nice lathe!
Your turret expansion project sounds cool!
Dustin
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Nice pulleys :)
Most of my work is boat related but mainly commercial fishing boats rather than pleasure craft.
Hood
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Nice Lathe Dustin...are you sticking with the original servos..? What drives will you be using..?
Looking forward to seeing the finished lathe!!
John
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The Drives look like VIPER 200s ?
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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
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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
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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.
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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