I did make some progress in spite of it all.

carriage motor mounted.

Old 5 phase vs. new.

Cross slide motor.

New spindle motor mounted.

More pics....

Temporary screen and keyboard while debugging. You can see the old DC drive in the cabinet. It is gone now.

Pics of the turret. I got it mounted a while back, but haven't had a chance to post any pics. I did get it moving around and all the switches and encoder work. Haven't tested the positioning solenoid yet.

Probably going to get slow again, because I have to try to make up for two weeks of lost work plus clear out all the limbs and trees. It's thundering now. I hope we don't get too much in the way of severe storms, because what is left of the power lines is held together with spit and bailing wire right now.

Monty

I don't know if you have the turret running under Mach control yet, but you might want to consider a Cubloc PLC.   The turret on my converted Hardinge CHNC takes 8 inputs and 2 outputs.  The Cubloc gets the tool number from Mach, then rotates and indexes the turret to the correct tool number.  I believe the Cubloc processor and board cost about $140.  You can see it starting in my thread here:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50685&page=13

Vince

Vince,

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out. Right now I am planning to use mach to control the turret with a macro or brains. I am rethinking the whole thing now that I have it all torn apart and the DC drive is no longer taking up so much space in the cabinet.

Monty

Back from the dead!.....

Started working on the lathe again. I had some noise issues with the turret wiring. I tried to use an all in one cable. Which was a bad idea, and I knew it but I tried it anyway. So I wound up running separate shielded cables for the stepper and the IO on the turret, tracing down all the shielding and making sure there were no ground loops. I managed to kill all the noise gremlins. Then work intruded.

So now I'm trying to get back in the swing of things.

I used Scott Shafer's diagnostics screen to make sure that all of my inputs are working properly. THANKS SCOTT!!!! You saved me from being committed because I thought for sure I was going insane.

I am going to have to write a macro or a brain to control the turret. So in keeping with the baby steps before running philosophy I thought I would start out by getting an LED to correspond to each input state for the turret.

I'm using OEM triggers 2-13. (I would have started with 1 but that causes a notepad screen to maddeningly appear. This is very disconcerting to be rotating the turret and have a bazillion notepad windows open up.

I've set them up in ports and pins, and confirmed they are working.

In screen designer what is the mysterious process used to interface the oem trigger to the LED? I have tried the OEM trigger number. I have tried the corresponding signal number from the wiki. What gives? Nothing works.

After I get that to work I want to make a button that activates the locking solenoid on the turret. Then assuming I haven't  run screaming from a cliff, I will attempt the brain or macro.

Monty

Anybody out there running a cnc lathe have any good advise on tooling?

Most of what I have done lathe wise was on manual machines.

Right now I just want to have a fairly versatile set up. In the future I'm sure my tooling list will grow as jobs come up.

I have 8 positions to play with on the turret.

What I have in mind is the following:

1. Turning Facing chamfering LH
2. Turning Facing chamfering RH
3. Contouring LH
4. Contouring RH
5. .5 drill
6  Center Drill
7 . Combo boring bar LH RH
8. Parting turning combo

Keep in mind this is just off the top of my head. I'm a Noob with a CNC lathe.

Monty
 

The lathe is finally all systems go. I have begun to tool it up and have a project already lined up for it.

I had some problems chasing down noise on the machine before I finally discovered it was on the ground line from the geckos. I was getting nuisance trips on the E-stop. I didn't find it until I had re-routed half the wiring. Now it is as stable as a rock. I have the debounce set to 100. I also had a problem with the spindle drive faulting out under deceleration. At first I thought that it was a problem with the phase converter or the spindle drive. Turns out I needed an external braking resistor.

It has been a long road, complicated by the fact that I essentially retrofitted the lathe twice!!! In the future I think I will just spring for the bucks and get things going faster rather than try to scrimp and save. There is just too much time involved to justify saving a couple hundred dollars. Especially if you have to rip it all out and do it right in the end anyway.

The next project is going to be a big one. I have a 5 axis Artran mill to retrofit. I've slowly been collecting parts. It's going to require a big chunk of change to buy the axis motors and drives. I'll start another thread to follow it.

Thanks to everybody who helped me get this lathe up and running....special thanks to Brett and Art!!!!!

Monty

Wow Monty, that is one clean machine. It looks great!!! 

Brett

Post some video when you can, its looks great !

JH

Monty:

   Thats one sweet unit, you should be very proud..

Art