Mazak VCU500A-5X no battery alarm, lost position, 80-100 hours no solution
The Mazak technician is scheduled to wave the magical mystery wand. We left on Friday, back on Monday a week and a half ago, and the VCU500A-5X lost its positions, so we put two guys on resolving that. They spent about 5 working days on that talking to support and attempting procedures. The procedure doesn't work. There is no physical position to find and teach, so it doesn't seem logical. The procedure involves using the home reference buttons and letting the home position indicator lights find themselves. The Y axis on this machine apparently never got the blue red arrow indicator tag installed when it was built, so that complicated that process, but I searched for it like 50 different times and got it to light. After finding X,Y,Z,C,A, the machine is telling itself it's running out of travel prior to getting to the 602mm to reach the toolchange position. (We're like 40mm short), I wouldn't be surprised if the home position is erroneously taught through use of the correct procedure.
We just bought a second brand new Doosan Puma 2100 SY II today, and I'm having a little trouble even wanting to continue to be a used customer of Mazak. Mazak seems to be a solid machine. It seems that working with the control and issues like this are more likely to result in down time. The solutions I have seen interacting with the Mitsubishi control involve very nuanced solutions that seem overly complicated.
If Mazak could get their support staffed to the extent that we could expect them to arrive in 8-32 hours, we would probably not try to resolve these basic issues ourselves. It would be really cool though if we could resolve some of these issues that shouldn't happen to begin with, internally.
I mean to see working machines put themselves down because they can't tell you the batteries are low, that's just sad.
We just sold our last Yama Seiki machine today (a pretty good machine, and it's Fanuc so its rational, but factory support is a little thin in our area), and I have one hurco to sell to be done with Hurco (the hurco is just temperamental like a Mazak). Doosan's have been really great. Responsive support you barely ever need. That's a good machine.
Re: Mazak VCU500A-5X no battery alarm, lost position, 80-100 hours no solution
Mazak came in which was nice and not 2 weeks as Mazak support was suggesting it would be (perhaps it would make more sense to allow the local guys to handle their own scheduling), apparently the adhesive tag that either was never installed or that fell off, which was different than the other tags which were riveted on, resulted in the Y procedure not working. The "grid" was off 1 position, so the machine was .470" out of home ref pos. Procedures unknown to the "technicians" in Mazak support were used to move the grid one increment which allowed the home ref pos to move .470, and apparently the toolchanger needed to be walked into alignment with parameter edits using a procedure that involved dykem blue on a Cat-40 tool, looking at the rub on load and moving in .003" increments until the rub didn't occur.
I was hoping to post the procedure for people, but it was complicated and the guys instructed to write it down were not shown all of the steps so we don't have it.
We tested a battery change with power on, restarted the control only without shutting off main power, and did not lose the position. The tech recommended we keep the main power on for 4 hours after a battery change. We are going to change batteries at 3 month intervals from now on.
The tech also took a backup at the home reference position and claimed this backup could be used to recover positions if the machine was parked at home ref pos every night and found dead in the morning. That's a second procedure we are going to implement.
The tech also recommended we dremel cut a line at Y ref pos to serve as the new indicator for a future attempt to restore Y ref pos with the original procedure.
We are also going to coax the table center and record the values from that known position, to the home reference position, so we can check the ref value if we ever need to re-teach it.
In summary it is my opinion that the ref procedure really sucks, and that there should be a method based on physically locating the table center and teaching that position, because that is simple and would work well in the field.
Mazak VCU500A-5X no battery alarm, lost position, 80-100 hours no solution
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