Originally Posted by Big_d  Wow a LC40 a lot of machine for that kind of money. They are very solid and quick if you use both turrets at the same time. Hence the 60hp DC motor (About equal to a 25-30hp ac motor). We used to spin a 110kg chuck and a 16kg part at 1700rpm on ours for many years before it was retired about 15 years ago. Does this one have the brake option on the spindle motor? It makes it a real pain to change the belts. Make sure the filters are in good order on the cooling fan as this is the quickest way to cook one of these big DC motors. I retro fitted an even larger blower and several paper element filters on ours it helped drop the motor temp quite a bit. Ours was finally retired due to it catching on fire in the control box. It was sold as scrap iron and I believe we got 2200 as you probably know they are around 9 tons. |
Thanks Daza, great info!
It does have the brake on the spindle - I didnt know that was an option! As far as I can tell it has almost every option. The original owners used it to run parts for I believe the oil industry. It was just one part, over and over, all day long. So they got the options to open the door through an M-code, and the option to clamp/unclamp the chuck. Then they had a robotic loader (which can be fed with codes from the control, as far as I can tell) and they just let the thing run all day and all night. Then it was purchased by a guy who used it for turning large parts as-needed. He sold his shop to his brother and I bought it from the brother who wanted to move it to make room for a 2nd Mori (since he liked his first one so much and the LC40 took so much room, and he no longer wanted to do big parts to limit liability for material costs if he screwed one up!).
The more I use this machine the more I like it. I am quite amazed it had so much capability considering it was made in 1986 I believe. I can program a profile and just let the machine figure out how to cut it, and it cuts beautiful threads and will take gigantic cuts without so much as batting an eye.
Good tip on the filters - while I had the cabinets off I looked at them and they are absolutely covered with dirt and greasy oily goop. The outer one was anyway, inner one was OK. Did you ever need to change the brushes on the motor? This one runs like a champ - all the belts look almost new. For some reason I can't clamp/unclamp tooks in the live tooling on the A turret. There is a pressure gauge right behind the Z axis servo and it reads zero. I believe this gauge is hydraulic pressure for the live-tooling part of the A turret, and I haven't looked into why there is no pressure. I also have a controller board problem that gives an error when the 2nd turret tries to move in the X-axis, but I do electronics design and I am going to try to fix it myself
- I was able to repair the TRS-50B servo driver from our leadwell mill so maybe I'll get lucky again! If I can't fix it I will just send it out to get R&R'ed. I work with the A turret now and its pretty quick, so I can imagine doubling throughput having 2 turrets - would be very cool.
If you have any more tips or comments on these machines I'd love to hear them. It was funny when they moved it in here. We told the rigger it was 25,000lbs and they brought a 25,000lb forklift. Well, that may lift 25k lbs but probably only when the weight is right back against the rear of the forks. So of course the forklift went up in the air when they tried to pick it up. They put a 5k-lb forklift on the other and and still no luck. They ended up bringing in a 2nd 25k-lb forklift and putting one under each end and being very careful to sync their movements. I shudder to think how it will be when we end up moving out of this place!