Not sure what to do about electronics enclosure

[phantomcow2]

Haha, I forgot about this thread.
Well, I ended up buying a Hoffman 16x12x7" on eBay.

[mlaws1172]

I have been working on a two in one encloure. The top is for the computer and the bottom is for the controls and power supply.

They are seperated by metal but all in one. It is working pretty well and am on the second proto.

I thought it would be nice to get rid of some of the cabling and wiring.

A couple of pics

The last picture is the white wall model

[BobWarfield]

Those are cool pix, mlaws.

I've been slowly making progress on my own enclosure project. Here are the driver electronics in one 19" rack mount:



Here is the PC in another:



These two go into a little fabricated rack that will have a swing arm on top that rides on the shaft you see at the back:



The swing arm has a keyboard tray, and a stalk that a 17" touch panel LCD screen goes on. Between the two will sit the lathe's control panel/pendant on a velcro quick release:



I'm further along than the pictures imply--I didn't have the camera handy to track the last two weekend's progress.

Best,

BW

[phantomcow2]

I saw an enclosure for a Series I bridgeport where the computer case was literally put inside the original bridgeport electronic enclosure. It had plenty of room room for all.

[Ron111]

Bob,
Nice enclosure, I take it that you are closer on your 9 x 30 cnc, I currently cnc'ing a 9 X30 for a friend and should wrap it up in the next short while. I would be interested in seeing your motor mounting schemes.

Ron

[BobWarfield]

Originally Posted by Ron111 Bob, Nice enclosure, I take it that you are closer on your 9 x 30 cnc, I currently cnc'ing a 9 X30 for a friend and should wrap it up in the next short while. I would be interested in seeing your motor mounting schemes. Ron

They're all up on the web site:

http://www.thewarfields.com/cnccookb...heSteppers.htm

I don't know that they are tremendously worth the effort to copy. I went to a lot of trouble to design something that could be removed to put the machine back stock, and that would require minimal milling. I did them before I got my IH Mill long ago!

My latest thinking on this is to play with the existing leadscrews for a while, but to eventually look at installing a ballscrew for the X axis that goes on the back of the machine with the ability to release it to restore manual operation.

For the Z-axis, I plan to fabricate a whole cross slide assembly with a ballscrew that replaces the current compound and cross slide entirely. I'll just bolt it atop the apron. It will run on small linear slides and use a ballscrew. My hope is that it'll be a whole lot more rigid than what's there now, which would be a nice upgrade to the machine. I also wanted to do something with a lot more travel than what is currently there so I can run gang tooling if desired--the poor man's tool changer. At the very least I want to run the cutoff tool on the back side and upside down.

I don't think it will be hard to do these things and I have some Rhino3D sketches. I just want to finish the original version off before I get started on the "new and improved." It's been taking a ridiculous length of time and I'm trying to keep the progress moving.

I will likely also do my IH Mill CNC conversion before I upgrade the lathe to ballscrews. The ballscrews are so cheap on eBay and seem like they would improve performance so much, I'd look into it.

Anyway, no sense hijacking this thread further, it'll all come together on my blog at cnccookbook.com. If I get the lathe running, I'll pull together some pix and do a build log for the 'Zone.

Best,

BW

[BrendaEM]

phantomcow2 , couldn't you use an old PC enclosure?