Oh Blimey I bought a CNC Lathe !!!!

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awemawson:
Apart from the obvious mechanical assembly that holds a twelve station tool carousel, buried in the works there are all sorts of goodies. There is a solenoid for locking, a feedback sensor to say 'locked', an encoder to say where the turret is rotationally, a motor to turn the turret either clockwise or anti-clockwise to select which tool to use, a motor to drive the 'driven tooling' (end mills, drills etc) and finally a valve to control the through tool coolant. Pulling off the two cover plates doesn't give very good access One reveals the wiring connections and the other the solenoid and encoder.

awemawson:
The reported 'not locked' status is entirely correct - I can turn the carousel by hand. Oddly to my mind the locking solenoid seems to be biased to the 'unlocked' state, and powered to 'lock' this doesn't seem right to me. It all looks rather rusty and grotty, but the solenoid moves freely enough and if I push it into the 'locked' position, the digital input for the feedback sensor changes state. Also if I rotate the turret by hand, the encoder bits count up in binary correctly.

I now need to devise a way of powering the solenoid remotely so I can see what is happening. It's the old case of 'the actions round the front, and I need to be round the back' :bang:

Have a picture of a rusty solenoid:

awemawson:

--- Quote from: lordedmond on July 02, 2013, 11:46:51 AM ---well done it will not be long now , it does look as if the major hurdles are behind you now

Stuart

--- End quote ---

Thanks Stuart, yes it seems to be coming together at last. Still loads to learn about this machine. Amazing what facilities have been built into it.

awemawson:
Amazingly I found some web documentation on the tool turret: http://tinyurl.com/toolturret The numbers are the same but it is not quite identical. It has a useful cross sectional drawing that I'm trying to interpret.

A bit of investigation this evening has proved that the lock solenoid (which draws 2 amps at 24v DC) works, and if jiggle the turret round to a correct position drops in its locking hole and provides feedback that I can read as a digital input. However the turret still has a bit of radial movement - looking at that drawing in the link above it implies there is also a toothed 'Hirth Serration' detent that possibly isn't seating firmly.

I've also proved that the motor that turns the turret works both forwards and backwards by manually operating its contactors. The relay that drives the solenoid is a plug in variety and suspiciously it has obviously been changed at some time as it is a different colour from the rest, however there is a tell tale LED on the relay drive digital output that is not lighting so perhaps some software condition has not been met to get it activated. More head scratching.

Here's a bad quality picture of the bank of relays:

John Stevenson:
And I thought I had trouble when the drive belt snapped on the trusty ML7 ?

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