Messages

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General Mach Discussion / 4th axis

« on: December 01, 2010, 05:19:26 PM »

I want to build a 4th axis for my mill I would like to drive it with a ac servo motor. I'm running my machine with an AJAXCNC dc3io kit. It uses a mach3 plugin to run and it works well. I do not know how to add the 4th axis to my setup. Ajax offers a 1 axis expansion plc but it's for a brushed dc servo. I need to know if I can run ajaxcnc's plugin and also use a modbus device or something to run the 4th axis.

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Mach4 General Discussion / New people welcome !! Come in here and introduce your self!

« on: November 29, 2010, 04:00:20 PM »

Hi, y'all I'm Bobby Neal. I am fairly new to machining parts. I started out two yrs. ago with a 13 1/2" x 40" Grizzly Lathe and a 9 1/2" x 39" manual mill with x axis auto feed. It didn't take me long to figure out that I didn't like standing behind that mill for hours to make a relatively simple part. So I started searching for used cnc mills. I hit pay dirt! I found Bridgeport R2E3 Ridgid head mill with Boss 8 controls, running in a shop, that the guy needed to sell to buy material to fill an order. I gave him $1,000 for the machine and about a dozen tool holders and carted it home. The old controls worked but I had no idea how to use them and at that time knew nothing of cnc controls in general. Hours of online research later I decided to buy new controls and sell of the old ones to pay for it. I went with Ajaxcnc. I kept the 3 phase spindle motor, and dc power supply and the dc servos. The MPU11/DC3IO Kit is what i bought and I also bought their advised 2000 line encoders. The install was fairly straight forward and went off without a hitch. So as far as AJAXCNC KITS are concerned their very good. BUT!!! The support of their equipment is about as lousy as I've ever seen. I will definatly seek another system for my next retro. I like their equipment but hell good equipment without technical support is nearly useless for most. All I can say is thank goodness for a large community of like minded individualls to lend an ear. I also built my own rotary phase converter to run the mill. I have a copy of Solidworks and Solidcam and their super programs and very easy to use.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: Spindle Speed Encoder

« on: November 13, 2010, 08:04:21 PM »

Thank You. I was unaware that mach wouldn't update during movement. I thought that in FPR that if it were given a comand to feed at .2 IPR then it would watch the true spindle speed to know how fact or slow to move the z. but knowing that it only looks at the rpm at the start of the thread if it was reading true spindle speed at least it would have an accurate starting point. As it is know I have a very crude dial on the face of the machine that measures rpms by the 50's 100's and 500's depending. I will be threading at around 60 rpm and if the spindle speed dro was working i feel that at that rpm the machine has lots of torque and shouldn't slow more than a couple rpm while cutting so it should be pretty dead on. but as it is now i'm having to program an rpm and then try to make the machine actually turn that fast with my old junky dial. Also the ajax motion control card does have extra io but didn't come with any instructions on how to get those inputs to talk to mach3. And I'm still learning as I go so even though I got the controler installed and working rather quickly that was because they had lots of info and detailed instrutions on that part know I'm working on my own little projects and that's where the funs begining. Haha. Do you think a induction motor with a vfd in conjunction with the index pulse card would help. I know that on tormach's website their duality lathe uses mach 3 and their threading with only an index pulse on the lathe spindle while using the mill table for the lathe x axis and the mill spindle w/rigid mounted tool for the lathe y. I think that this tech is simular to what i'm wanting to do. All that being said I don't have a tormach machine nor do I know how their getting it to work in that manner with mach3.

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General Mach Discussion / Spindle Speed Encoder

« on: November 13, 2010, 07:22:20 PM »

I have a bridgeport R2E3 mill and it has an air driven motor that controls spindle speed so at this point i can't use closed loop feedback to control speed but I bought a cnc4pc index pulse card in hopes of using it to be able to use IPR feeding on the z for more accurate tapping. I'm controlling the machine with mach3 with an ajax cnc motion control card. I tried to hook the cnc4pc index card to pin 15 on my pc parallel port and connect it to mach3 through that access point in ports and pins but even though i've verified 5v and an output htz that moves with spindle speed( using a multi meter ). The onscreen led for inputs doesn't light up. Logically all I can think of is that since I'm using a motion control card that mach3 isn't letting me use the parallel port. HELP!!!! Please!!!