Thought you guys might be interested to see how weak willed I am.
All of the following happened after I had told myself NO NEW PROJECTS until I had finished some of the existing ones.
Just over a week ago I went out to buy some fibreglass resin and Gelcote, I happened to call in at the olde world machinery dealer where I bought my Bridgeport and some other bits of old cast iron machinery.
He has had this Denford Orac kicking about in a corner for at least 6 years, it was there when I got the Bridgeport. It was covered in dust and was covered in surface rust other than the bedway which looked OK.
I had kept my eye on it on all my previous visits but not given it too much thought, anyway after looking round and seeing nothing of great interest, I was about to leave when the dealer said " you can't go without buying something", I don't know what came over me and I gave him a STUPID bid on the Orac, He added £20 to save face and I bought it.
Half an hour later it was in the back of my Mondeo hatchback and I am driving home convincing myself it will be a great project for me and my lad to upgrade to Mach3.
I arrived back home and unloaded it with my engine crane, assembled the cabinet/stand and gave it a coat of looking at.
It looked complete and reasonably good nick the initial problems I found were:-
1) E stop was busted
2) Perspex guard was missing a couple of bits to slide on
3) No data cassettes.
4) The calculator on the front panel didn't work.
So next step was to fit a switch to replace the E stop, oil the ball screws and plug it in.
Bingo!! the screen lit up and a few relays clicked. Now what to do? I had no idea so I faffed about with few reset buttons (2under the front panel and on the cross slide) and before long I had the chuck spinning and the
X and Z axis under manual control.
Time to educate myself now so onto the Denford website nnd download some info.
While I was reading through the info I decided to fettle the lathe into tidy nick so I removed the chuck, which was a little stiff to operate, along with the compound slide and multifix tool holder and tailstock. All were dismantled and given the derust treatment, then glass bead blasted, oiled and re assembled.
Time to try a programme, Entered a programme on the keyboard and did a fresh air run, bloody hell it worked apart from the programmed speed changes to the spindle didn't.
Time to investigate, spun the lathe 90 degrees on it's cabinet and dropped the back cover down, removed the headstock end cover to reveal the speed encoder. In the back are 6 or 7 diagnostic led's and one was not working, it was the speed control one.
Had a fiddle with the multimeter and came to the conclusion I didn't know what I was doing so adjusted the speed / sync pick up on the spindle encoder and hey ho the led light up.
Typed in the programme again (remember no cassettes) and fired it up and it works like a dream.
So now you can see why it's a non project, it all works, and I just need some means of saving programmes now.
