My light machines basket case....help?

[johnny t]

Well my first post and my first CNC, hope you guys can help. Found this craiglist special of a mill. lil surface rust. cleaning up well. the ball screws and linear slides seem to be in good shape also. Only thing, No control/driver box. the stepper motors are there and cabling looking for a home.

opened up some housings and see that this thing is muscled around with Superior Electric slo-syns. the spindle motor is a DC job I think.

My question(s) is, will drivers from say gecko or other makes than Superior work with these slo-syn motors?

the spindle motor wont go. were the motor electronics housed in the original control box? how can I find specs on this motor so I can source a power supply/vfd for this thing.

The videos I have seen of these lightmachines run seem pretty smooth, I would love to get this thing going and make my currently $300 investment go somewhere.

thanks again for any help.

[eartaker]

Help us out with some pics of the motors. Normally the geckos will work with all steppers but you need to know if the are bipolar or unipolar.

[johnny t]

I have a pic of the name plate on my phone, the model of one of them is M063-c506. 2.9 amp, 200 steps,

not sure yet if uni or bi. Is there a way to test with a voltmeter? my interpretation of the literature I have found on these units is that they can be wired for either?

I am a newbie at this so please use the cushioned chair.

[Fastest1]

Yes all of the steppers can be run on a gecko. It is actually a blessing all of the electronics are gone. You wont spend any of your time trying to resurrect a non supported machine and its software. Do you like to stay up late? Read alot? Get frustrated on a daily basis? You are going to love the new challenges! You will have to wire them so they dont exceed the 3.0 amp per axis of the G540 or go to a different higher voltage driver (do not do it, the 540 will be great for this machine). Is you rs a Sherline based machine that has been repackaged or is it the bigger model. If it is a Sherline it is an old AC motor, rheostat built into the controller box you dont have. Doesnt it have a 120v plug on the end? Mine did.

[johnny t]

a pic of my machine. pardon the size....



It is a tmc-1000 so that is bigger than the sherline mills me thinks. I was thinking the same thing regarding the electronics, and bought it solely for the chassis, spindle, ways/ball screws. I knew I had to figure out this CNC stuff eventually, hopefully this becomes a reasonable project. I stay up late and make my brain hurt all the time, but then I am just an amateur engineer.

there are two 120v plugs. I am assuming one for the controller and one for the spindle. They both terminate in the mills chassis.

[johnny t]

A gallery of what I have...

http://nohji.imgur.com/tmc1000_mill

[johnny t]

just looked up that G540 drive. one unit to run four steppers? I am intrigued.

[eartaker]

Nice little machine you have there. Yes the G540 is a breakout board with 4 motor controllers in a single unit. The G540 is actually made up of 4 G250 motor drives so if you burn one up you just replace that drive and not the whole unit.

[johnny t]

was worried a little about that. So the g540 is user serviceable too? guess the next question is what power supply/voltage to run?

[eartaker]

Yes the user can service it and Gecko has an AWESOME customer service.

for a power supply eh gecko can handle 50VDC so you will have no issues powering your motors. and from some searching I did it looks like your motors only take 3.36VDC @ 2.9A. I have never seen a stepper rated that low. If those are correct you could power your motors with an old computer power supply.

[hoss2006]

You can find the specs for those slo-syn motors here.
MC SUPPLY CO: Bodine Electric Co, KB Electronics, Brake Motor, Stepper, Gearmotor, Gearboxes, Clutch/Brake
The model in your pic M063-CS06, have an inductance of 2.85.
Put that in the Gecko formula, square root of the inductance times 32,
and you get a recommended power supply voltage of 54V.
That's the max you want to run them at, anymore and it's just wasted heat.
The 50V for the G540 would work great with them.
Unfortunately I just noticed that it's a 6 wire unipolar motor.
It can be wired up bipolar for the G540, but only in series.
That changes the inductance to 11.4 and for a power supply of 108V.
Good news is it'll give you 190 oz/in holding torque for the motor but at 50V it won't be a speed demon.
Still perfectly usable for that machine I'm sure.
Hoss

[Fastest1]

That is the larger of the 2 machines I have seen from light machines. Mine was a Spectralight by Light machines or something similar. I dont know about that spindle motor, it is not the 1 I was referring to. The 190oz steppers should be fine. You dont have the controller box? Are there any markings on the spindle motor? That is going to be a fine machine when hooked up. The G540 is a great package all the way around.