New Triac Retrofit

[davidimurray]

Well it's a while since I've last been on here!

Quite a few of you may remember my adventures refitting my starturn 4 about 4 years ago and it's good to see that so many other people are still retrofitting and keeping these fantastic machines going.

So why am I here? Well as of Friday I became the proud owner of the Triac. I used to use the machine in question for about 6 years before I left my last job. Since then the keyboard failed and the machine has sat unused and unloved for the past 2 years. So as you can imagine I was more than happy to get a phone call last week saying if I could get it out of there it was mine!

Knowing what a strong and verstile machine the Triac is I am really looking forward to get started on the retrofit.

I'm sure I will have plenty of questions to ask - and as a starter for 10 I was wondering what other people have done for power supplies? Looking at the main power distribution diagram that there is a very nice section of the processor board that has all the power in 12V and 5v that you could need. Should I just keep the main processor, or get the saw out ans start hacking the main board around?

I plan on trying to seperate the electronics from being below the machine as I hope to run coolant when complete.

Cheers

Dave

[Denford Admin]

Welcome back

[angel-tech]

Hi Dave, got the orac sensor working eventually. Nice to see you got the triac, lovely machines. This sounds like "trying to teach your gradma to suck eggs", but if you need any help give me a shout, i've done a few.

Tom.

[davidimurray]

Cheers guys

Tom - glad you got the Orac sensor working. Have you reused the 'datum' and spindle speed sensor on the Triac? Looking at the wiring diagrams it looks like you could recreat the simple transistor circuit on the original main board.

[angel-tech]

to make things a bit easier i use the limit switches as the home points rather than the datum/proximity switches.

[davidimurray]

Finally made a start on stripping the Triac last night ready to move the electronics into a new enclosure.

A quick question for those who have retrofitted. The step and dir pin wiring is easy enough but what have you done with the Fault, boost and energise signal lines? Energise can presumably be ignored by changing the jumper on the drives. Does anything need to be done with fault or boost? Presumably they can both be ignored?

Cheers

Dave

[sweep]

Hi David,

I have just ignored the fault boost and energise lines.
I suppose a nice touch would be to get an input to Mach3 for the Fault signal but i'm not sure how, or why, you could utilise the Boost.
My drives are continually energised as long as there is power (set with the jumper on the drive board), but I suppose you could have a 'slicker' set up by having them switched through the chare pump function of Mach.

...Sweep

[davidimurray]

Well - it has been a while since I posted on this thread so with some good progress today I thought I would update everyone.

Got hold of an old machine stand from what I think is an Emco mill from a tech college. Stripped the Triac from the base, stripped the electronics and then cut the top off the cabinet to give me a base for the machine. I then cut two holes in the baseplate and welded a couple of pipes on form drains for coolant. Under the stand I've added some brackets to hold my DIY coolant system.

On the electrical front I've stripped out the stepper drives, spindle drive, contactor and all the wiring / switchgear. I got a bragain industrial style switchgear box off ebay so the drives et al have been fixed onto the backplate in the box. I've added a big relay to switch the 240V to the contactor. Also when I cam to turn my machine on for the first time the transformer wouldn't work so I had to replace it. The transformer drives two little voltage regulator kits to give me 5V and 12V

To interface with the original drives, I used the good old drives interface circuit as I did on my starturn. I used a 16pin header so I could plug the original ribbon cable straight into the interface board.

I also made up an interface to allow the original datum switches to be used. Thanks to Simon Rafferty in helping me decipher the original denford circuit. Took me a while to get it working as I didn't twig for a bit that you neede to ensure you had a common earth on the breakout board 5V and the 12V supply for the sensors. With that sorted all the homes work great.

Next job will be to attack the spindle with a Homann digispeed and then finish off the limit switches. After that I will have to do the tidy bit and finish fitting out everything into the box before finally fitting the mill to it's new base.

I've been taking a few pics along the way that can be found here -
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=3 ... 1dac9f2f5f
Also there is a video of the first proper test run here -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSZrt-kGWTI