hi including the cost of the machine which i got for £200 and disregarding a few failed attempts with different breakout boards and driver boards about £1000 this includes things like filters , I also had some stuff laid around, like power supply's, relays,cabinet,wiring and switches etc. I intend t...

I did some accuracy tests today . I machined the outside dia. of an aluminium bar at 100mm/min , the bar was within .05 mm of being round, considering the backlash in the machine i thought this was very good. I then did the same test at 500mm/min and similar results. I then did the test at 1500mm/mi...

I got the spindle running under mach3 control tonight at last, I had a bit of a fight with it today but she's working good now.

Here goes , Try this link its only short but you can get the general idea.I need to do some accuracy tests soon. i got the home switches wired and working at the weekend.The next job might have to be the spindle drive or maybe put the door on the control cabinet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDf5Ex...

I'll see if i can upload a video sometime, I may get time over the weekend . I did some preliminary accuracy tests , just running a piece of program and returning to a position where a d.t.i. was parking at "0" against the side of the head and the repeatability was excellent, I ran the feedrate up t...

if you post a picture of what they look like,if they are what i think they are i may have a box full of used but good tapes you can have for the price of p&p. I haven't seen them for years but if they are the same they are around somewhere .

regards col

Well there you go!!
I had it running under mach3 control today, talk about smooth axis control, they were smooth as silk.
The maths worked too. 6m/min rapid travis and it looks awesome.

No spindle control yet and no home switches wired up, this is probably the next task

I mounted the drives in the control box and had the axis running using the tuning software

I measured the backlash when it was on steppers and got about the same as you mentioned on all axes. I never tried to get rid of it yet.
I will get it up and running under mach3 control first and see how it goes.
That might be a job for the next winter nights.

Hi The encoders are hp 512 ppr optical with a mechanical gearing of 2.5-1 on the motors, this will give an resolution of 4um if i don't use the encoder in quadrature. I could, sacrifice rapid speed for resolution but i think it will be quite good to see it doing 6m/min and 4um is not that bad. You l...

Sorry it took so long, as you can see it is still very much "on the bench" but its getting there, I am cutting the apertures into the cabinet now so i should be mounting the drives onto the machine shortly.

I'll keep you up to date, I have some rutex drives, a bob campbell breakout board and going to run mach3. I have run the motors on the rutex drives just for the purpose of tuning the drives and they seem smooth.I have not had them under mach control yet. I am trying to put the drive cabinet together...

Hi Roy I was thinking along the same lines and what i may do is fit one to each side, When they fail I think they tend to fail gradually over a long period and I don't think they are that unreliable or there would be a lot of people with bad heads and compensation claims against car manufacturers. :...

Hi The gas spring I bought was a stainless steel adjustable pressure spring, The pressure is at 640n when bought and you can let them down, being very careful not to go too far as you can only go down not up, Go too far and your looking for another one. When I first fitted the spring I disconnected ...

Hey, I fitted those motors on and ran them just off my power supply andd they look like they are gona work just fine, reckon i should get around 6m/min rapid. I'll let you know when the drives arrive

Hi Roy

what do you think of this, it works great and takes no space up. I got an adjustable gas spring off ebay and balanced the head perfect.

Better late than never, 3 cd20's for sale hear

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SD2/SD3 I have the three original drives out of my denford Triac mill these are 2off parker SD2 and one off sd 3 they are on the motherboard with the power supply, these drives may have a problem I'll explain if there is any interest. I'll explain anyway, if you plug any of the drives into the mothe...

Hi roy I am going to do a similar thing to my triac , I am retrofiting dc servo's so the balance is needed to, A. stop the servo drive burning out just sitting holding the axis up. B. stop the z axis shooting towards the table when the drive is switched off. Thanks for the look at yours, i might do ...

Has anyone converted an old triac to servo's , if you have what size motors did you use. I have the chance of some 240oz max torque servo motors ,do you think they are good enough.

col