Titivating a Wire EDM Machine

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DMIOM:
Maybe because there's a ghost trapped in the bubble? - (or is it a version of 'the genie in the lamp'?)

awemawson:
One of the other minor irritations that's been outstanding is a non working bulb holder. The "+V" axis motion button is a simple momentary 'press to make', that incorporates a bulb holder, the 24v flange bulb illuminating when the V axis has travelled to the 'Reference Position'. The contacts of the holder had disintegrated and none of my rescued spare buttons were suitable.

Compatible button available from RS for £26 but you pay extra for the bezel / label assembly, OR for £8 I can buy ten of them from Hong Kong, however these have a 24v LED built in.

Well as you may guess, I got them from Hong Kong and they arrived by today's post. Pretty tortuous fitting as it had to be done in situ as the control panel doesn't easily remove. However only four soldered connections.

Got it in, made a reasonable job of it, tried it, and the button is illuminated ALL the time :bang:

Fortunately this bit of the machine I have circuit diagrams for, so off I went searching. Turns out that there is a bit of very clever design here. North end of bulb (or LED) goes to +24, south end goes to driver circuit which brings it down to 0v, but there is a 110 ohm resistor also going to 0v. Now I'm assuming here, but I think that it's true. That resistor is intended to keep the bulb filament warm but not glowing. I've seen it before in high reliability equipment if you don't let the filament go totally cold both the bulb and the driver will live for far longer.

Well of course the 110 ohm resister was easily low enough value to light the LED which is happy at a few milliamps. Cure was simple, unsolder one end of the resistor and sleeve it. Now full functionality restored albeit with a slightly brasher colour to the light when lit !

.... however I'm chuffed to have found that :ddb:

vtsteam:
I somehow missed this thread, Andrew -- another classic!

I remember reading about the fantastic bubble memory in Byte magazine-- early non-volatile memory, and wishing I could afford it. Oh think of the possibilities!!!

Great sleuthing the cause of the lamp issue, and those wire reels are first class.

:clap: :clap: :clap:

awemawson:
Thanks Steve for the kind words :thumbup:

I'm not surprised you missed the thread seeing that you seem to hibernate for months on end and disappear off the face of the earth :lol:

awemawson:
Well at long last I've finished another time consuming 'sub project' that sprang from this re-build. Documentation

As I had obtained a brand new copy of the Operations Manual re-printed for me by Fanuc in Japan, it made my VERY tatty copy of the Maintenance Manual shout out for attention. The problem is that using the machine one's hands tend to be wet, which makes handling manuals in a way that will allow them to survive isn't easy.

I decided to scan both manuals into searchable PDF files with a view to having them available electronically as well as printing out and laminating key pages. Now I have a very nice HP scanjet scanner - (in fact I have two of them !) but it didn't survive the upgrade from Windows 2000 professional to Windows 7 Professional - drivers not available :bang: So needing to buy another scanner lead me to discovering the PlusTek Opticbook 3800:

http://plustek.com/usa/products/opticbook-series/opticbook-3800/

Not the cheapest, nor the most stylish scanner in the world, but designed specifically to scan books and manuals, so is laid out with the glass very close to the front edge, allowing scanning right into (within 2mm) the fold of a book. Also comes bundled with some very useful scanning software. Even better, a brand new one popped up on ebay at less than half price :ddb:

So I set to scanning - a laborious job - not too bad on the new manual but appallingly tedious on the tatty one that is literally falling apart. A bit of an issue cleaning up the scans (covered in another thread) :

http://madmodder.net/index.php/topic,10340.0.html

But having over come that I ended up with two humungous files. One of 219 pages and the other 313 represented as about 35 mByte each as pdfs.

Then I set myself the task of making the index pages dynamic, by inserting 'links' in the pdfs in the appropriate places to jump to the right page in the document. Three pages of index lines in the Maintenance Manual and another seven pages of links in the Operations Manual. Well this morning saw the end of that task thank goodness and I've actually been able to load them up to my iPad to view under iBooks AND the dynamic indexing works - quelle relief!

All I need now is a cheap waterproof iPad or clone for the workshop :thumbup:

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