Hello Guest it is March 29, 2024, 03:41:41 AM

Author Topic: My new project  (Read 39889 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Monty

*
  •  116 116
    • View Profile
My new project
« on: September 20, 2006, 07:40:46 PM »
Here is my newest project. An EmcoTurn140 that I picked up.

Overall I am impressed with the quality of the machine. It seems to be first rate. The machine itself is one of the many trade school orphans that show up from time to time. It seems to have very little use on it at all, in fact it appears to be virtually unused.

There are some peculiarities that are complicating this retrofit. One of them is the spindle motor. It is a Very nice 7.5hp DC shunt motor. Of course the control is very tightly integrated, and "modular" thinking was nowhere in the original designers vocabulary. There is no way I can see to separate the axis controls and the main spindle drive from each other. It is also set up to run on 380V 3p power. I guess that is what they have in Austria. Unfortunately I have 230V 1P to contend with. So I am looking at a controller that will let me run this existing motor at 3.6hp as is, or 5hp with a rewind of the armature. I doubt I will ever need 7.5hp in such a small machine. Anyway I figure that a 5hp DC motor will be better than a 3hp AC sensorless vector. Ever price a 4 pole regenerative 7.5hp DC shunt drive? Guaranteed to give you sticker shock.

The other sticky point is the 5phase Berger Lahr stepper motors. These are truly the red headed stepper child  :D of the stepper world. At the time this machine was made they were the cats meow because there was no such thing as microstepping yet. The machine has a published repeatability of .0001. Now whether that is true or not we will see, but I really don't want to fool with changing out the perfectly good motors on there for newer motors. They are also pretty beefy with a 1000oz in rating. So being a cheap skate I managed several bleary eyed 1am searches of old pdf files to find out that Vexta makes a modern version of this along with a nice little driver board. They are unfortunately very pricey if you buy one new. But fortunately since they are so proprietary and nobody knows what goes with what they were available used on ebay for $99. So I bought three as a gamble. We will see if it works out.

I'll keep you guys posted on the progress. I plan on using Mach 3. I picked up an aloris powerdex turret on ebay that might work nicely. Or I may just use a tool post. Or both! I would like to put live tooling on it using a separate stepper and a harmonic drive with an electric clutch. Should keep me busy this winter.



Hood

*
Re: My new project
« Reply #1 on: September 25, 2006, 05:42:51 PM »
A guy that lives close to me has a couple of emco lathes and a mill. One lathe is a manual and the other CNC but it is a conventional style lathe, not sure of the model, but they are well built little machines.
 Look forward to seeing your progress.
Hood

ynneb

*
Re: My new project
« Reply #2 on: October 23, 2006, 01:04:06 AM »
Bragger :)

Offline Monty

*
  •  116 116
    • View Profile
Re: My new project
« Reply #3 on: April 09, 2007, 10:38:39 PM »
Just thought I'd post an update.

yneb: not trying to brag.....just proud of my newest baby :)

Have most of the parts for the lathe on hand now. 160/1 harmonic reduction and a stepper to position the main spindle, still looking for a good clutch. Also got a carotron DC drive for the spindle motor. Will post some pics later.


The big news:

Finally moved the lathe into my new shop. Work got in the way this winter. Just finished the wiring and most of the painting inside the shop. 

I got tired of waiting on my neighbor with the backhoe and used the hillbilly rigger method, mixed with some advanced Egyptian technique. This would be under the heading "don't try this at home".

And a final pic to prove it did not end in dismemberment, you will note there is no blood on the floor or machine.  ;D

Monty

Offline Monty

*
  •  116 116
    • View Profile
Re: My new project
« Reply #4 on: February 05, 2008, 06:40:05 PM »
Rule #1

Everything takes a lot longer than you think it will! :(

Finally getting around to the meat of converting this lathe. What was going to just be a simple hook up mach and go thing got a little more involved.
The machine was hardly used. Which is a good thing, but it sat for almost 30 years. Without any use the way oil never did wash the cosmoline off the ways.
The X and Z were both frozen and the ball screws were covered with fossilized grease. All of the way wipes had to be replaced. To get to the way wipes, you have to
disassemble all the sheet metal.  From there the "while I have it apart" mentality took over and now it has new paint as well. Oh well, I never did like the machine tool in drag
look that it had before. I also had to rebuild the powerdex turret I scrounged for it. Whoever had it before did some "maintenance" on it. This person apparently thought that RTV silicone is a miracle substance, good for everything from assembly lube to an overall conformal coating. I'm not joking the whole thing was coated with silicone inside and out!!! :o Some of the internals were corroded pretty good, so I guess they were trying to stop coolant from getting into the turret. They might have tried installing all of the O-rings, most of which were missing ::). Fortunately most of the damage was superficial and easily fixed (except for scraping all of that #$%*&@#$ silicone off so I could re-paint it. So new seals and O-rings plus lube. The other thing I am doing is replacing the 3 phase AC servo that powers the turret with a stepper. I'll sacrifice speed, but It's a lot easier to deal with on this machine as everything else is run by steppers.

Hooking up the turret is going to be a project. I need more inputs than I can get from the serial port. Maybe the new smooth stepper board will be the way to go!! The turret needs 9 inputs. and 1 outputs in addition to the stepper motor. The input hog is the 7 bit encoder. Does anybody have any suggestions for hooking up the turret? Whats the best way to do it? let a subroutine in mach control it or use a stand alone plc?

Anyway my current focus is getting the turret re-assembled and mounted. By the time I get around to that the smooth stepper board should hopefully be available and I will have made some wiring decisions.

Monty

Offline Chaoticone

*
  • *
  •  5,624 5,624
  • Precision Chaos
    • View Profile
Re: My new project
« Reply #5 on: February 05, 2008, 06:52:12 PM »
That is looking good Monty. Good I tell you.

Here is a link to the Smooth Stepper forum.
http://www.warp9td.com/index.php

Brett
;D If you could see the things I have in my head, you would be laughing too. ;D

My guard dog is not what you need to worry about!

Offline Monty

*
  •  116 116
    • View Profile
Re: My new project
« Reply #6 on: February 13, 2008, 11:17:04 PM »
Thanks Brett,

I think I've finally got all the electrical bits ordered. They should be here the end of this week if the weather holds. I decided to go with a PCI parallel port card, and another breakout board in order to run the turret. Also finally got the O-rings from Dorian. What a pain!! and they are proud of them too!! >:(. I'm currently working on the adaptor plate for the turret. The plan is to put the turret back together this weekend and start the wiring next week. That is if I can finish another work project this week.  :P

I used the KISS method this time. I plan to have an on/off switch and an E-stop hard wired.  Everything else will be software configurable on a USB or modbus pendant. My mill has all kind of interlocks hard wired for safety and it is a pain to start up and shut down. That is mostly due to the nature of what was available when I first did the retrofit. No mach3, charge pump etc. On the lathe the on/off switch will power up the computer and the charge pump powers up the main spindle and axis drives through a contactor. It should be just like booting up a computer. I think the controls are getting to the point that the only thing that makes sense is software configurable user interface. Otherwise you just wind up being way behind as things get better. I see that Art has started on lazy turn! I can't wait to try that out. This stuff is getting really cool!

I can remember putting together my first dual celleron 300 box and loading up Rhino. I thought things couldn't get any better. This was back when an SGi box cost a bloody fortune and the software to run on it was in the $25-50K range.....that was 10 short years ago. Then I bought an old Bridgeport Boss and put an Ah-Ha control on it. I thought that was pretty neat....that was only 8 years ago...Now I have full parametric solid modeling with assemblies, FEA, and mechanisms on a box so fast I can't believe it for a cost at least a factor of 50 less than the bad old days, and my Bridgeport runs Mach3 with conversational programming  ;D 

Give it about 10 years and the fab at home stuff should be coming along nicely. Then molecular assembly. Pretty soon I'll have my very own replicator on my desk, and then I won't know what to do with all this heavy iron I worked so hard to accumulate ;D.

I don't know where this is heading....but I think it will be on the same order of magnitude as the steam engine and the industrial revolution.

You guys keep up the good work!!!

Monty

Offline Monty

*
  •  116 116
    • View Profile
Re: My new project
« Reply #7 on: December 19, 2008, 04:31:20 PM »
Does anybody out there in cyberland know anything about this EMCO part? I am trying to hook up the spindle encoder and I don't have any documentation on it.

Offline Monty

*
  •  116 116
    • View Profile
Re: My new project
« Reply #8 on: December 19, 2008, 04:37:05 PM »
Some additional info

The disk is brass. It has 1 long index slot, and numerous shorter timing slots. There are two sensors, one taller one for the index slot, and a shorter one for the timing slots. There are two wires to each sensor, some resistors, a POT and a capacitor on the board.

Part number on the sensor HGA2003 B525 (made in mexico) (googling this doesn't find anything)

The board is an EMCO part and they are less than helpful.

Thanks,

Monty

Offline Chaoticone

*
  • *
  •  5,624 5,624
  • Precision Chaos
    • View Profile
Re: My new project
« Reply #9 on: December 19, 2008, 08:28:26 PM »
Hey Monty, That is an encoder. I haven't set one up yet but I think the simplest way to get to do some threadign would be to set up an optical switch and make another disk for it to sense. If your running a Smooth Stepper, you may be able to use the encoder. If you could find the pin out for the encoder that would be great. I'm sure it will use 5 volts DC. All encoders I have ever seen do. Can you get any numbers off of the chips on the board? Might be able to find their pin out and go from there.

Brett
;D If you could see the things I have in my head, you would be laughing too. ;D

My guard dog is not what you need to worry about!