Giddings and Lewis Retrofit

[MetLHead]

Hey Guys,

You may or may not know that I work for a CNC retrofitting company. Well, we just finished with this G&L retrofit that I think is really nice and I wanted to share.

You can't even see the most interesting part of this machine. The original machine had a 5" spindle that had a max RPM of 1200. We completely gutted the gearing out of the head and put in new, fixed ratio gears. We then added a two speed ZF gearbox in front of a 50HP spindle motor. This eliminated the shifting from inside the headstock and raised the max RPM to 3000. Two sensors were added to monitor the incoming and outgoing spindle oil temperature.

The external spindle encoder allows multi-point spindle orientation and rigid tapping. The X, Y and W axes are all set up with dual feedback. The servo motor encoder is the speed feedback, and Inductosyn scales provide the position feedback.

The new CNC is a Mitsubishi M65S with ethernet and hi-speed / hi-accuracy control. With new AC servo motors the rapid rate went up to 300 Inches per minute on the X and Y axes, and the maximum feedrate went to 200 IPM.

You can see all of the new drives in the picture of the electrical cabinet. The top unit is the 45kW spindle drive (50HP continuous) and the lower units are the axes drives.

My involvement with this project was the setup and programming of the CNC control. I write the PLC logic and setup all the control parameters and basically make sure everything works.

I've got some more pictures if anybody's interested. Or, if you've got questions let me know.

Thanks,
Scott

[Banzai11]

That looks and sounds nice...any suggestions for doing a similar Lucas 5" ?

A friend has just started the job and is going to use Mach 3....

Please post the other pictures if you still have them...
Thanks!

[gridley51]

Cabling in the panel pic looks a mess.Not very professional looking.
Mark.

[DennisCNC]

Nice work!!

Who cares about the cables if the machine is making money!!

[DareBee]

Although I have seen WAY WAY worse wiring jobs, the guy that cares is the 1 that spent 50 to 80k on the retrofit.
Then again maybe he doesn't.

[DennisCNC]

I think most times the guy that spent the money is fishing somewhere

[Al_The_Man]

Although a bit impracticable in these times, I used to get a kick when coming across an old system that used the are of lacing
http://www.dairiki.org/hammond/cable-lacing-howto/
Modern equivalent pic.
Al.

[DennisCNC]

I was taking apart the control on my old bridgeport BTC 2 and they must have used a zillion zip-ties but it looked good.