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The Sequel - Oh Blimey I bought a CNC Lathe (Beaver TC 20)

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awemawson:
Overnight the paint had hardened sufficiently to flat down the blemishes and when it was delivered spray the inside and undersides with the RAL9001 creamy colour, which seems to be quite a good match to the original - just looks cleaner !

Then despite the replacement proximity switches having arrived from Germany I earned some brownie points taking the wife to Rye for a coffee and look at a water sports place she wanted to investigate for grand child entertainment.

By the time we returned the paint had dried sufficiently for me to turn the bits over and spray the tops and outsides (Who said I'd calculated that  :lol:  ) and before supper I was able to re-assemble the replacement proximity switch into the four way block and test all four ways.

I'll give the tinwork one more coat on the outsides tomorrow as this paint is going on at only 1.5 thou per coat according to my film thickness meter.

This version of the switch has a nifty tell tale yellow LED inbuilt - if the other had they don't work any more ! One feature that I hadn't appreciated was that the mounting screw goes co-axially through a jacking screw, used to align the front faces of the individual elements to the housing.

Then it was a case re-fitting the four way block (I set the gap to 0.5 mm as the proximity sensors range is 0.0 to 1.1 mm) and of re-threading the cables up the ducting, re-making the connections and giving it a soak test changing tools and moving about. At the time of typing it's been running 20 minutes, so early days - fingers crossed.

JerryNotts:
Andrew,
What film thickness meter are you using. I presume you are  using wet paint, not powder coat.
Jerry

awemawson:
Jerry, it's a rather nice device made by Sheen that I must have bought yonks ago. I'm ashamed to say that when I dug it out of the cupboard the 9 volt battery was dated 2004 - I always scratch a date on batteries in equipment when I install them - fortunately this one hadn't burst and actually was still measuring 8.5 volts, but obviously I changed it.

Yes it's a wet paint system. I gave the items their final outside top coat this morning out in the sunshine as it was a relatively still day.

Last night I ran that soak test spinning the spindle, moving the axis's and tool turret revolving for over an hour and it ran faultlessly. However my Infra Red thermometer told me the the heatsink on the Field Coil Drive card Thyristor was at 125 deg Centigrade  :bugeye: Now that's the maximum permitted JUNCTION temperature for the device which must have been far higher in fact.

So this morning I put my trusty AVO 8 in series with the field windings and they were drawing 4.5 amps - the card is only rated up to 3.5 amps apparently so I tweaked it down to a conservative 2 amps during testing, and it now is running at a slightly more civilised 60 degrees - still really too hot as, as it is mounted it is directly below an electrolytic capacitor which is being slowly cooked. Motor still seemed to work happily but of course I'm putting no load on the spindle.

Then it all went wrong  :bang:

I'd been doing manual turret changes, foolishly stopped it part way through one, pressed the reset button, and it went into eStop with an error saying that the PLC program was not running. Somehow I'd corrupted the program.

So I then cleared down and reloaded the controller - it takes about an hour at 9600 baud, and all was right again. However when I went to initialise the Tool Turret it wasn't reading the 4 way proximity bit for Tool 8 where is happened to be. Squinting in at the gap it looked bigger than the 0.5 mm I'd set it to yesterday on Tool 1 - sliding in a feeler gauge brought up the reading, so I reckon that the drum with the projecting pegs is very slightly eccentric, Tool 8 being almost directly opposite Tool 1 where I'd set it to 0.5 mm. So I re-set the gap at Tool 8 to 0.25 mm and hope it doesn't scrape the face off the sensors when it turns round ! (it doesn't)

Now I need to re-write my diddy as it was wiped out in the re-load !

Got to worm, fly treat, ear tag and foot trim the sheep first though !

vtsteam:

--- Quote from: awemawson on August 02, 2018, 07:30:06 AM ---Now I need to re-write my diddy as it was wiped out in the re-load !

--- End quote ---


Wha?  :scratch:


Must be English or some other foreign language.

awemawson:
A diddy program Steve is just an off the cuff small bit of code created usually at the console to test some function or feature - in this case the Tool Turret tool change reliability.

Written in Sinumerik's dialect of G Code, which in most cases is pretty standard. This one was only a dozen lines or so. But even so I should have saved it for future use by porting it out to a PC on my network . . . . but I didn't !

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