HF 8X12 CNC Conversion starting...Need Help

[rowbare]

Nicely well thought out design. Respect.

I agree, this has to be one of the tidiest small lathe conversions I have seen. Great work ronncat.

bob

[knudsen]

Gosh Blades...I don't know what to say But thank you for making my day.

Don't be shy, friend, you've done a wonderful job on this.

[justin bowser]

Ronncat, most excellent conversion in every way - I'm speechless! I need to go remove all the pictures of my pathetic conversion so y'all don't make fun of me!

Justin B.

[ronncat]

Took a little sojurn from my CNC lathe adventure.. a couple of trips... a lot of work... Then I took a mild detour and started flying Radio Control again... this time trying helicopters. Needless to say, I suck, but I'm getting better. Figured that I would need my machine working so I could make all the parts I've been busting. Soooo...

Quickly designed and milled the cabinet face for my Gecko G540 and all the necessary connections. Now I just need to wire everything up and I'll be good to go. Try to get this done in the next few weeks. I just need to get my motivation back.

[cornbinder23]

Good to have ya back Ron,
Sooo are you a pilot or a pile it
control cabinet looks good, any pics of the guts?
I have finished the mechanicals on mine but havent posted anything yet on the conversion, but I will start a thread soon, I still have to take it all back apart for painting so I will take pics of all the parts during assembly
Just finished the building the touchscreen for it today(I hate mouse's for machine control) and have the axis controller all wired up and tested but its too damn cold to really get any motivation let alone get the darn thing painted
Mach turn is definitely a different beast from the mill module and I can tell its going to take me a while to figure this one out, even after the conversion is done but it will be a fun learning experience and rewarding in the long run

BTW would you guys still consider an 11X26 a "mini" lathe as I cant figure out where to start this thread as it is considered a benchtop machine lol

JTCUSTOMS

[ronncat]

Hi JT,
Thanks for the welcome back. Really interested to see your conversion, wow... an 11 X 26 tabletop

Anyhow, no internals in my box yet. I have everything, but I've been racking my brain the last few days figuring out how I'm gonna wire up the VFD, my Gecko G540 along with MachTurn. My goal is to be able to have both manual and CNC control of spindle on/off, direction and speed. Think I have finally figured it out... Need to use a 2 coil latching relay so my momentary manual pushbuttons will work the same as the relay controlled by Mach. Then I need to put a 3PDT switch in the circuit to choose manual or computer control. Then I need to reconfigure the VFD for Forward/off, Reverse/off wiring as opposed to the 3 wire setup I have now. whew

Anyhow, the internals will be similar to the box I made for my Promica Mill conversion. I'm going to use a regulated 50V power supply instead of the non-regulated I used for the mill. If I get things down on paper, I'll start wiring things up this weekend. Wish me luck.

[HoboCrow]

Hola,Ron, ( greetings from Uruguay for another week )

Nice to have you back on the lathe project ... I've missed your post ...

Good looking enclosure for sure and the VFD arrangement you plan sounds good to go. I recently picked up a New, 3ph, AC (2hp) motor on _bay for $70US shipped, might be over-kill - but couldn't pass on it. If my existing 3/4hp DCV system turns out to have too low a torque curve for low speed threading - I'll have a backup.

I've got the ELS installed and running, turned some test cuts and threads - all went better than expected - I'm very pleased with it ...

I'm also happy to hear that your an RC pilot and staring on Helios - I've recently started destroying helicopters myself and much faster than I can rebuild them ...

As Cornbinder says ... I'm a "Pile it"!

Later and Regards,

Bill

[ronncat]

Hi JT,
Good to know that looking on the Artsoft forum that I'm not the only one struggling to get Machturn to work

Anyhow, finally wired up everything. Got the X and z axis's (?) working, but the estop and limit switches are causing me fits. Thinking of taking the rest of the day off so I can research. Keep me posted on what Hood tells ya...maybe a copy of your xml file when you get it working. Thanks..

Ron

[ronncat]

Sorry ... deleted double post

[cornbinder23]

Hey Ron
Ya I am having issues as well, as you have read
I have done alot of research to no avail so hopefully Hood can hook me up
Are you running a G540 with yours?
I am going to go out to the shop and get those .xml's and see if he can help
Everything is wired up and ready to go, C3 is installed, pokeys control panel wired up, now just have to figure out the hotkeys for the machturn functions,but that shouldnt be too bad because you can assign them to whatever you want anyway in Screen4 designer, but I would like to keep them as close to original as possible( I plan on making my own screenset for Machturn as I don't really like theirs too much)
Jogged all the axis under the mill profile and holy @#$! I had the x axis set to 200ipm while I was bench testing and that is WAYYY TOOO FASST
choked it back to about 100ipm and that is still a bit too fast
I just finished the touchscreen mod and got a nice keyboard for the console, now I have to mount it
anyway, I suck at taking pics but I will end up documenting everything as i have to disassemble everything to paint the lathe to match the mill
Man it sure is nice having the cnc mill to make parts for this lathe conversion

JTCUSTOMS

[ronncat]

Hey JT,
So...spent a bit more time this afternoon on my build. I set my axis to 60 ipm. That seems plenty fast for me. Don't want to slam into the chuck by accident. My touchscreen works great. Picked up a 20" widescreen HP for less than I paid for the 15" touchscreen on my mill. Love it!!! It is much more accurate in response to my inputs. Nice to have a bigger target to aim at.

Anyhow, got the e-stop issue taken care of. Had to go into general configuration and check estop with charge pump...or something like that. Unfortunately, not so lucky with my limit switches. I think I need to wire a diode across them as they seem to be picking up voltage through the ground wires. Even though they are being fed 5 volts, I'm picking up over 8 volts on the other side of the switch! I recall having a conversation about wiring the limits with Mariss when I was wiring my G540 up for the mill. I'm hoping once I get everything wired I can tidy up the wiring, build an enclosure and then start making stuff!! Have a feeling it's gonna be awhile though.

Good luck and let me know how everything turns out

[cornbinder23]

Ron,
Got her all figured out and everything works good, ran a little wizard (in air)
and it dundidit
Ya the touchscreen is nice, put one on my mill when I did that conversion
the 5-wire resistive overlay works great on both machines and the monitors were free so they just cost me the $$ to convert them
looking forward to seeing you making some stuff, I know it might be a while (same for me)

Later

JTCUSTOMS

[ronncat]

At last I have a functional CNC lathe with working home/limit switches

I was just about to jump off the nearest freeway overpass when a call to Mariss at Gecko cleared up my problem. Seems that the G540 inputs require an open collector (ie spst) to work properly. Unfortunately, the hall effect limit switches that I built following another post in this forum weren't actually open collectors.
However, a little transister here and a little resister there...wala... it works!!!

And don't forget the protection diode on the outputs of the G540...THANKS AGAIN MARISS.

Anyhow, now I need to figure out how to configure the rest of MachTurn, clean up my wiring, build an enclosure and a monitor mount and the lathe will be complete. Will post some pics when I'm all done.

[snowluck]

Wow. Sorry to bring a post back from the dead but this is amazing. I'm on break this weekend for turkey day and I was playing around with my 8x12 lathe and I realized I would love to convert it to CNC. Its small enough that it could fit in my dorm

Would it be possible for me to get a copy of your drawings? I may modify few parts about the z axis but I would leave the x axis alone I think.

I plan on machining it while at school on a cnc mill and then assembling it when I get back home in mid December.