Well I've planned how I will do the toolchanger.  I have to add an index for station one on the carousel.  It's amazing that the Meldas control didn't use one.  All it has is a locked position sensor for the geneva wheel mechanism.  This occurs on every station.

I will probably use my own picaxe based controller to handle most of the atc cycle.   Mach and the printer ports just does not have the required i/o.    With a grex this may be possible.   The spindle orintate part of the cycle is the most difficult to get right.

I'm just finding it hard to find time to wrap this one up.   I have the big Hardinge lather to finish off after this one

Wayne...

Took a break from the Hardinge today, and spent some time sorting out the carousel on the Leadwell.

One thing that always worried me was that there was no index signal on the ATC to detect any of the stations.  How the Meldas control handled it I have no idea! 

So I decided that all I needed was a signal to detect station 1.   This is with a microswitch operated by a cam squeezed onto the carousel which has just enough clearance under the Geneva wheel.   Space is very limited...

Also made an Adjustable bracket for the switch which clamps around the hub.   

Pics below.

Wayne...

 

Not much going on with the retrofits, but it's the day after Christmas and I'm working again:( 

Treated myself to  couple of cheap 4" vices so this job can be run in less time.

100 done this afternoon, only another 260 to go Arrrgh..... and this is only the 1st side..

Wayne....

Hi Wayne,

this thread may help in your quest for a simple spindle index mechanism :-

Graham.

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=1942.0

Graham...

The index and ATC is all sorted.  I went with my original idea of using some of the original gear on the spindle and my own PLC.

The index shown above is for the the carousel only, the original control never used one, but probably used a paremeter in the control and some non volatile memory to store the last carousel position.

Oneday I'll get ome pics up here of the setup.  I may even post up my <$10 PLC design   at the moment I'm just too overwhelmed with work.

Wayne...

Neeto.. FYI. Using the white balance function will compensate for the lighting color and get you white coolant back.

Hi the coolant is actually Flourescent Green, Fully synthetic.

Wayne...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgH1WVz90Ek

A quick and dirty vid from the job above.

Hosted on YouTube to save a bit of bandwidth here.

Benny, any way to embed these?

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/GgH1WVz90Ek" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/GgH1WVz90Ek</a>

Wayne,,,,

Wayne did the dirty. With a name like that, your sure to get a lot of hits. Dirty twins. LOL I love it.

Brett

Looks good.

LOL, thats just my sense of humour slipping out!   But it has had 70 odd views in less than 24hrs.  Probably very few Mach users

I'm running the over side of the job now, won't bother doing a vid though, maybe the next job.

Be much nicer if these vids could be embedded in the messages here.  I did produce a SWF version but it cam to over 200Mb which I felt far too large for such a little vid.  In AVI form on YouTube it's about 100Mb.  But I can get it down to much less but not suitable for direct viewing here.

Wayne....