| The Craftmans Shop > New from Old |
| The Sequel - Oh Blimey I bought a CNC Lathe (Beaver TC 20) |
| << < (155/260) > >> |
| JeffK:
Thanks for the quick reply Andrew. From the photos you have posted your machine does look somewhat different to mine. I will do as you suggest and take plenty of pictures tomorrow to post in a separate thread. I think that some of the issues I am having have been due to the axes being manually moved by turning the ballscrews with the power switched off on the machine. This is resulting in errors in the pulse encoders and possibly preventing the zero return. Not sure how to fix this just now. Anyway I will post a new thread and hopefully people can give me pointers. I will continue to follow your thread with interest as I too hate to see good equipment scrapped just because it needs a bit of attention and time spent on it. cheers Jeff |
| awemawson:
Jeff, so long as your axis's are on the 'inside' of your travel limit switches and reference sensors, then winding by hand with the power off should not be an issue. After all that is why you have to pass over the reference sensors to reset the controllers measuring system. I can put you in touch with an ex-Beaver Engineer who undoubtedly can assist, but he is extremely good at writing invoices I should warn you :bugeye: You appreciate that Beaver went to the wall in the early 1990's so not many are about who know these machines, and as far as I can tell they only made something of the order of 250 of these lathes. I look forward to seeing your new thread! (Can you please limit the picture size to 800 x 600 pixel to save on Eric's server space) |
| JeffK:
Thanks Andrew - it would be good to have his contact details - though I think I will battle on myself just now as I am still making slow forwards progress. I believe quite a few of the machines went for the export market so likely hard to find anyone in the know in the UK. In addition I am up north of Aberdeen so even harder to get anyone to actually work on it.... cheers Jeff |
| RodW:
Geez, I finally gathered up the courage to venture into this thread and waded through from beginning to end. What a mission Andrew! Congratulations! I kinda wondered part way through if it would have been possible and easier to retrofit it with LinuxCNC? Some of the hardware from Pico Systems and Mesa (which I use) might have provided a way forward without being constrained by lack of factory parts. And I also wondered if it would have produced a superior result? (Mainly becasue one day I might try and do that to an old machine). It kinda nice to open up Google Drive in Chrome on your machine controller so you can download the cad files you want to process.... |
| awemawson:
Rod, The motivation was to get it back 'as was' and anyway there are some massively powerful servos and spindle drives on this beast that would cost a fortune to replace. I know of a chap who has done what you propose to a Beaver TC10 the smaller younger brother of this machine, but it's not what I wanted to do. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |