EMC gets fitted to a Leadwell CNC VMC

[kudos]

Hi all

i throught i would come here and share some photos and info etc on my conversion project we are doing right now involving fitting EMC to an old 1985 Leadwell machine.
has 550mm of X travel
16 ATC
10M rapid

this machine had an old mitsubishi control fitted to it but we deemed it was time to change it over to something else for our needs. as we needed a control to do 4th axis work, as well as process blocks quicker many other things, As well as refitting the machines control we have also been bussy giving it a good well needed service on slides,ballscrews etc.


For the PC we have gone with Mesa 5i20 card setup, two cards infact due to IOs and 5 axis A-D control (at time of buying hardware EMC did not have the 5i22 support unlike now)

PC specs are
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-S3G
CPU: E4600 Core 2 Duo- 2.4GHz
Memory: 2GB DDR (cheap as chips these days)
Hard Drive: Mtron solid state hard drive 32Gb plenty of room for emc and cnc programs (will be installing linux file server into office to access all programs over later so storage space will be no problem ever )
GPU: Asus GeForce 8600GT 512mb graphics card
Motion Control: 2x Mesa 5I20 Cards with 4x 7I37 I/O cards & 2x 7I33 Analog cards

(see wiki if intrested in the Latency test results)

here are a few early on photos, we have been doing abit on and off over weekends and spare time (im sure you know how it is)

Few photos from when work started


as you can see, guards still on machine, the old brain is on the table on machine, control interface is mounting on the arm hanging over the machine table.


These photos below show guard taken off, many things stipped of the machine, ball screws taken out so we can take the slides off and fit encoder to end of the ball screws (fitting 2500PPR encoders using Quad), to check oil lube lines & restrictors and also replace some slide matrial ( turcite little like PTFE matrial but many other additives with in it) on bottom Y slide





Here is a photo of where the old control was mounted, the new home for EMC


Here are the 3 axis drives for the axis motors, they are mitsubishi drives and motors fitted to this machine, as they use resolved for feedback we will be fitting incoders to the ball screws.




Here are some quick snaps of the mother board mouting to alli sheet plate which will mount where the old control once was.

if any one would like DXF etc for mother board mounting hole locatino etc please let me know, will be happy to share it so you could make your own up.



Hope to update with some more photos soon, as machine is now repainted and the slides are back on ballscrews back in, and most of messy wireing pulled out for new to be installed.

[cadmonkey]

Looks very nice - keep the pictures coming

Another wonderful EMC example fitting.

Greg

[stevebeale]

Come Rob and K its about time this was finished

[kudos]

here is a quick video of the machine in action, showing cutting some splines on some shafts on the 4th axis, and quick show of the axis interface in use.

the guard on table is to come off once we get the rest of sheet metal done as machine will be fully inclosed then.
next video will be of some real milling,drilling, rigid tappin etc.
for now injoy

[samco]

very nice work! that has to be the quietest machine I have heard.


Any gotchas?

sam

[123CNC]

Nicely done. I really like your axis speed & direction indicators added to the display.

Hope you will share some tool changing videos along with rigid tapping.

Thanks for sharing. I don't think I'm alone in marveling when people demonstrate there personal execution of using EMC2 and how well it can meet the premise on which the EMC project all began. Especially in the bigger iron. Breathing new life into your machine.

I would be curious to hear how would you rate it overall compared to the original Mitsubishi controls, assuming you ran the old controls.

[kudos]

hi, thanks for the comments.
yes we ran the old control for many tears (~20 years) as machine was not too old when we had it.
the old control it would kinda of wallow around, in drill cycles it would pause abit on blocks.
the first thing we saw with EMC was the block execution speed just no pause what so ever (not what one can see )

it was realy well worth taking machine apart to give it a very good service we had not i don't think it would be as good. so time well spent in redoing slides, lube system pipes etc. as u say it runs nice quite on screws and slides now.

i believe i ram them drives even harder as they are hardly working still quite a steep ramp.

tool changer works perfect, both ways etc i will be sure to upload a video of it soon.
still using the old Mitsubishi FR-SE ac drive one day i may upgrade spindle motor and drive so i can use the renishaw probe on it fully. as old drive is +analog only.

thanks, robert

[richardfp4]

Hi Kudos,

This is really well done. We are evaluating to rebuild
a waterjet with EMC. Circular roundness is important
for us. Apart from mechanical clearance, every PID filter
has some inaccuracy at the quadrants of a circle. It also
depends on the resolution of the encoder.

Did you already test the circular roundness for your Leadwell?
I mean just cuting out for example a 40 mm hole with a 10 mm
mill, after that measuring the diameter on all the places.
There are a lot of things in the EMC software that will need
optimization here.
I am very curious about your results with circular roundness.

Thanks
Richard

[samco]

Come on now - don't leave us hangin!

sam

tool changer works perfect, both ways etc i will be sure to upload a video of it soon.
still using the old Mitsubishi FR-SE ac drive one day i may upgrade spindle motor and drive so i can use the renishaw probe on it fully. as old drive is +analog only.

thanks, robert

[kudos]

well sods law i went to use the machine yesterday and now the mitsubishi spindle drive is
not working properly has a fault with the regen & ramp side of things. so does not brake the motor from a speed to zero and just errors out

maybe it was feeling little left out as everything else has been cleaned/fixed or painted!!
so right now looking at ways to fix it or have it fixed (best quote yet is £1300 - 1500+ or £2500+ exchange unit) or i change the inverter for new technology and get my full spindle positioning.

richard iv not milled a pocket yet and checked it out on our trimos but i exspect it to be as good if not better than what old control could do. most of it is into getting the backlash and jib strips done up right. also good motor tuning will help alittle. EMC is always keeping machine on the move due to its quick block processing times.

robert

[kudos]

quick video update

i was using the mill the other day and was doing some rigid tapping, so throught id better make a video to add up on here.
so here we have it

Rigid tapping M3x0.5 at 1500RPM in the video. tapping 8holes in total
i did try 2000rpm but found on way out most time was spent waiting for spindle to wind up so no real advantage but still worked grate
once i get the encoder board for the VFD ill try little faster as hope to ramp/accelerate spindle up quicker

[pimpbike]

Hi, great work on the retro! Maybe I missed something but did you reuse the original mitsubishi servo drives?