After clearing the axis fault I found that the machine began to show signs of life.... I could now jog a little way on the x and z axes and jog the spindle but that was about it.
A bit more internet trawling and I introduced myself to parameters..... and the annoying 8000 PWE.
I found that the stroke limits were stopping me jogging the full travel - whats more they seemed to be completely out of whack. Unfortunately at this point I tried jogging to the end
of the travel on the z axis and hit the hard overtravel (more about the soft overtravel later). With this I got an EMG shut down and was scratching my head again. I tried all kinds of things but in the end resorted to manually winding the machine back (with the power off) to get it back into its happy zone. That sorted the lack of movement but now on startup I get a pulse encoder fault. Not a problem because I can clear it after startup.
So back to parameters.... every time I tried to change anything I got a write protect message. I trawled the internet again and found that on parameter 8000 I needed to change PWE to 1 to enable writing to parameters - easy I thought. I pulled up 8000. went to PWE, keyed in 1 and got.... a write protect message
It turns out that you can access 8000 in about 4 different ways, but only when you go through the general settings softkey will it allow you to change PWE. I'm sure there is a logic there somewhere but it is beyond me....
So once PWE was set I could change the stroke limits... cooking by gas!! I changed them to something more reasonable and suddenly I could move full travel on everything
I though now we are there !! Start up as per instructions and everything will work,,,,, no such luck.
I dutifully followed the startup instructions in the manual until it got to zeroing. Turned the selector to the zero setting - and nothing happened.
Well I spent the next week or so trying to find out 1-if anything was supposed to happen and 2 - was there something wrong with the switch, or 3 - was I just doing it wrong.
It was at this point I got the phone call and forgot to switch everything off. When I came back - the zero switch miraculously worked. Again I don't know why - just glad it is.
I carried on to zero the x axis - which it did flawlessly. I went to do likewise with the z axis and got a hard overtravel EMG. Back to turning it back by hand.....
I decided the Euchner switch was not working so - like a fool I dived in with my multimeter and in the process shorted out a terminal and was back on the hunt for blown fuses. In the process though I established that everything seemed to be ok and noticed that both the hard and soft travel ramps that the Euchner switch rides up on were at the same point. Obviously not right so I moved the soft overtravel ramp to the centre of the z axis (for convenience) then measured the euchner switch gap to the ramp. Sure enough it was too close and had actually pushed the ramp along until the hard stop had been reached. At this point I tried passing the z axis across the soft overtravel ramp a couple of times and nothing registered. I thought it has to be the switch....
It turns out the centre pin of the switch was very stiff and it was a lack of travel in this that had resulted in the ramp being pushed along its mounting. WD40 and a bit of exercising loosened it off and all of a sudden the soft overtravel worked again. Reset the ramp in the correct position and I could zero both x and z axes !!!! Happy day!!
Next stop turret!!!
Well having followed the startup procedure as far as zeroing all I had to do was initialise the turret and the instructions said I was good to go.... but how?
I pulled the turret open and as Andrew had said it seemed like I had a Baruffaldi turret. I should mention at this point that most of the ID plates on this machine have long since worn away so I am still not sure.... Anyway more poking and prodding then off to the internet. I managed to pull up a maintenance manual for a Baruffaldi turret - much newer than mine, but it included a wiring diagram - with wire colours!!!! It didn't get any easier than this as the colours on the diagram match all of the colours in my machine.... I messed and prodded and poked a bit more - and added a multimeter into the mix and came up with a loose wire and a bad connection. tightened and cleaned up and try again. No joy.
At this point (today actually) I was leafing through the operation manual trying to figure out if I was just doing it wrong when the MDI command page fell open in front of me. It explained in some detail how to enter MDI commands.
On the Beaver instructions after zeroing it said ' switch to MDI and enter a tool number to initialise the turret eg T0200; I had tried to do this many times with no joy.
On reading the aforementioned page it said ' in MDI enter the program softkey, then input a word to the text program. Press execute then press program start'. I thought maybe I am doing it wrong so followed the Fanuc instructions rather than the Beaver instructions. Hey presto the turret sprang into action. Well once started there was no stopping me - the spindle spun up to 2000rpm, the quill went in and out the turret was well and truly spun and everything sprang into life. I think I may be there!!!
All I need to do now is learn how to use the machine - which was the point of getting it in the first place.......
