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Thread: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Michael, Where are you located? I am in the same boat as you as far as machining my castings for such as the oil grooves and ball screw mounting locations. My mill is up and running manually but I am not machinist and have a lot to learn on procedures needed to complete even simple task.



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Mike Hall, check your private messages for my location and contact information.
    Thanks



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Bill South, tried to send you a PM but your inbox is full .. Gary



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Very interesting Idea there Michael

    Mite copy that

    Cheers
    Tim



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Sorry Gary;
    Inbox cleaned.
    Kurt;
    Forgive the use of your thread but all is cnc related!
    Bill

    billyjack
    Helicopter def. = Bunch of spare parts flying in close formation! USAF 1974 ;>)


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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Sorry all, I've been kinda neglecting my own thread, but I see it has been in good hands!

    Bill, no forgives needed. Since I am leaning something I am all for this thread being used this way! In fact, thank you all for jumping in and sharing your ideas, I think I always learn the most from threads that are not strictly on topic, and I'm sure others feel the same way.

    Bill, I would like to learn more about you planetary PDB you have made. Have you posted pictures anywhere? Also, you mentioned a thread posted during the design of the Novakon PDB, do you have a link to that?

    Michael, thanks for the excellent description of your axis drive setup, it looks simple and well though out and very functional. I think that is what Flashcut CNC what trying to do with their kits, but they did not take the idea quite far enough to make a reliable system out of it. It looks like you have flycut the front of the base casting to square it up, is that so and how did you do it?

    Thanks for the observation on the replacement ball nut not necessarily fitting correctly. I am prepared to repack it if need be. I repacked the other nuts and experimented with them on different screws until I got the best combination.

    Re: Red / Gray ball returns. For some reason I thought the gray ball returns had metal liners, and the red ones did not, have you noticed if that is the case?

    If anybody needs help with machining oil grooves etc. I am in NE Atlanta and am general friendly to anybody that needs the use of a mill for such worthy tasks as a CNC conversion . . .

    Kurt



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Kurt, I may you take you up on the offer to machine oil grooves and perhaps key the X axis ball nut housing. I was thinking of asking Bill South for a hand with that since he is only about one hour from me, but you never know. This is very friendly community.
    The front of my mill was faced off from the factory. I just took a DA sander to it to remove the gobs of body filler and paint to get a clean mounting surface. I will dis-assemble the whole thing and strip and paint it anyway. Charter Oaks paints these mills Gloss Black which makes it look like a car with bad bodywork. Black shows every ripple and bump in the castings, so not a good choice but the machine seems solid.
    Thanks you, It was Flashcut CNC that I got the idea for the drive system from, I couldn't remember their company name. They used an extensions on the stock acme screw and attached the drive. I don't imagine that worked very well. I think there thing is selling the electronic packages.
    Have any of you installed the Craftsman Linuxcnc GUI work screen? I really like the looks of this because it sort of resembles Mach3 or Path Pilot screens. I downloaded the files from him, but haven't tried it yet. There are several screen tabs.
    Concerning the ball nuts, I didn't notice any difference in the liner, in fact my eyesight may be getting worse than I thought because I didn't know there were liners in them.ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC-linuxcncscreen-jpg



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Michael, I have spent many fruitless hours trying to get that Craftsman GUI to work. As far as I can tell the files in the folder Pietvr posted on the LinuxCNC forum are from a mishmash of different revisions, so there are a bunch of things missing. I tried to delete the references in the Python code to the missing files just to get the GUI to start, but there were so many errors I gave up in the end. I think is would be fairly doable to duplicate something like PathPilot form scratch, but have not had the time to play with it yet. I started making a Haas mimic GUI for LCNC, but I decided something more like PathPilot would be better, and more strait forward to copy. I know very little about Python, or coding in general so I am very slow at it, but I will mess with making a new GUI when I get some time.

    Kurt



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    I haven't figured out how to get Path Pilot. It looks very elegant.



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Kurt, Any updates? I got word and tracking info on my motors/drivers which according to FedEx will be here tomorrow. I have not been working on any drawings or anything lately as I have had other priorities to deal with but I think once I have the motors and what not show up i will find motivation to make some time.

    Looks like I better start doing some research with what I read in the last few post. I honestly have no clue what Path Pilot or Craftsman GUI is. I see you guys saying you know little about such and such and I am still not even sure what it is you know little about. haha

    Kurt, I am still planning to make a trip up to to check out your handy work and do some milling on my castings.



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Mike, I have been working on other things as well. I have made some progress on planning the control panel and the electrical box though and I got back from school early yesterday so decided to paint the motors to seal the laminations up to keep oil and coolant out.

    Here are the motors drying in the rafters, its warmer and less dusty up there.
    (Since it's in the picture, does anybody happen to know anything about that Atomic Laboratories Ray-Actor, I can't find any info on it, but it appears to work.)


    I also got the control panel arm welded up and painted to match the mill.


    Here is the arm and mock up panel test fit.
    I know it is on the wrong side of the mill, and I've already goten a lot of grief about that, but I did not have much choice since I wanted to reuse the hole were the Z crank was mounted.


    Back side of the panel.
    It was a pain fishing the wires thru that 1.5"OD tube. I had to grind off one of the clamp screws on the VGA connector to get it thru at all. 1.75"OD would have been perfect.


    That is pretty much all the progress I have made, not much. I did make the neighbor girls some V-carved name plaques, though. Came out well considering the top spindle speed of 1970rpm.


    I used the F-engrave program included with LinuxCNC to do the programming based on PNP images.


    Mike, hope your motors arrive safe and sound. Also your welcome to come up whenever you like. You will find me tinkering in the garage any day but Wednesdays when I'm at school.

    Thanks for looking!

    Kurt



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Oh, I forgot the most important thing, as a bonus the mill turns out to be quite musical. Here it is running the Daisy.ngc program included with LinuxCNC. Same idea as the program that would play Daisy on the Commodore 64's 1541 floppy drive, though, hopefully, a bit less destructive! It is hard to hear in person, but the microphone really picks it up.



    It is possible to "tune" the mill by editing the stepper scale in the G-code file, I did not notice than until after I took the video though so its a bit out of tune.

    Here is the highlighted Daisy.ngc G-code file if you are interested:
    Daisy.ngc

    Thanks,

    Kurt



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Kurt, the jealousy is hard to fight off. haha

    Guess what came in today!!! I am kind of impressed with FedEx. My package left China Tuesday and arrived at my house this morning early.

    I love your control panel setup, I think I shall do something similar. If you want, I have some 1/8" black acrylic that I could cut you a switch panel from. I could engrave whatever you want on it and it could be color filled to make it look ultra professional. The sheets I have are 12x24" so if you want something cut let me know and I will hook you up.

    Now, I better get to designing my motor mounts so i can figure out what length ball screws I need so i can get those ordered.

    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC-20170216_141945-jpg  


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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Looks great Mike! Glad your motors arrived quickly and undamaged. You never know with international shipping. When I got my motors the boxes had apparently been exposed to something acidic, as they were eaten thru in some places and very crumbly. Thankfully the motors and drives were in plastic bags and were not damaged.

    Boy, with you copying me so closely I sure hope everything works out alright, otherwise I'm in big trouble, and the scary part is you know where I live

    I might take you up on the engraved panel, but since it is 13.5" X 20" it would have to be broken down into two pieces. I have some .125" aluminum sheet at school I was thinking about waterjeting it out of and then engraving it on the mill. I have been thinking about how to fill the engraving. I need to experiment, but I think it might work to dust power coating powder into the engraving, and then remove the excess with a damp cloth on a wood block so it would leave powder only in the engraving. Sounds easy in theory . . .

    Kurt



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    A little more progress today.

    I got the painted control panel arm back in place and all the wires fished though, once again. The white UHMW bearings and wires will be hidden by a little sheet metal cover that will attach with some #4-40s. I guess I can go ahead and draw those up so I can waterjet them when I'm at school Wednesday.


    So far I have been running LinuxCNC on a rather bulk old HP tower. For a trash pile find its a good machine (2008 with a 2.8GHz quad core processor) but much too big since it won't even fit under the mill's stand, much less in the Hoffman box. I had an Intel D525DW mini ITX with is the perfect size so last night I decided to put Ubuntu on that and see how worked with LinuxCNC. I had some trouble with it not recognizing the VGA port as the main screen since it is essentially a laptop mother board and defaults to LVDS. I eventually edited Grub to include the boot parameter "video=LVDS-1:d" right after "quiet splash". This apparently forces the VGA port to be the main display. It beats me why Intel did not include a setting in Bios to disable LVDS, since there is not even a LVDS port on the board. Or, better yet, disable it completely! Whatever . . .

    Anyway, the D525 feels only a little bit slower then the HP, even though it has a lowly 1.8Ghz atom, and it works just fine with LinuxCNC so that what I'm going to use, for the mean while at least.

    I made some spacers and a little poly carbonate plate so I could mount the 7i76 directly above the D525 for a compact arrangement. I think I will mount the SSD on the bottom of the plate underneath the 7i76.


    The 7i76 looks like it is missing some teeth with some of the plugable terminals removed!


    Thanks for looking!

    Kurt



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Did not make much progress on the mill this weekend. I did do some spring cleaning, though. It's about that time already here in the south. In the process I through out about 24" (if that's the unit of measure for such things) of catalogs and publications and regained some precious counter space upstairs, or upladder to be precise.



    Much better now. I can actually see some of the bench!



    In the morning I am going with a friend to pick up a Mazak VMC he was given. Some people have all the luck. It weights 9500lbm and I was told that the shop where it's at only has 5000lbm forklifts so it should be an interesting move. It is all there and in good mechanical shape. The control is somewhat unusual so it might be a good candidate for a LinuxCNC conversion, but I'm not going to volunteer for that, yet!



    Thanks!!

    Kurt



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    A very nice build indeed, will follow with interest.
    My small mill is not CNC yet but I do use Linuxcnc (and PathPilot) on a Gecko based controller with a couple of CNC routers.



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Kurt, I want to bench test my motors, controllers, and figure out the tuning connections. If I understand the procedure, it looks like you need a special cable to connect to the drivers. The manual says it's USB to RS-232 serial cable. The port on the driver looks like something else, not a standard USB. Do you have one of these, if so, where did you get it? Am I on the right track here? I would like some help in getting this going. BTW, I did manage to find a Path Pilot restore disc on Ebay. From the looks of this post on CNCzone, it sounds fairly easy to get going on a non-Tormach machine. A lot of people have done it, including Snowy who replied to this thread.
    Please advise.
    Thanks, Michael



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Kurt, I want to bench test my motors, controllers, and figure out the tuning connections. If I understand the procedure, it looks like you need a special cable to connect to the drivers. The manual says it's USB to RS-232 serial cable. The port on the driver looks like something else, not a standard USB. Do you have one of these, if so, where did you get it? Am I on the right track here? I would like some help in getting this going. BTW, I did manage to find a Path Pilot restore disc on Ebay. From the looks of this post on CNCzone, it sounds fairly easy to get going on a non-Tormach machine. A lot of people have done it, including Snowy who replied to this thread.
    Please advise.
    Thanks, Michael



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    Default Re: ENCO RF45 Clone CNC Conversion - LinuxCNC

    Sorry, never mind on the cable, I have several of these, it is a USB on one end and the type used on external DVD players and other gizmo's.
    Here is the Path Pilot thread on none Tormach machnes from CNCZONE. I have read all of the LinuxCNC tutorials. It looks like a lot of cutting and pasteing in the editor.
    http://www.cnczone.com/forums/tormac...-software.html

    Last edited by mrichard1; 02-26-2017 at 08:08 AM. Reason: new info


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