Here's another quick page that show the progress of the Shiz. While it's working, it still needs a lot of work. As of this AM the front panel and all of the things that I want it to control are not complete.

The automatic drawbar is almost done and that will probably be the first front panel control that gets connected.

I really want the spindle speed - VFD / Vari-ratio / Back gear to be controlled by a micro and I want a % load indicator on all of the motors.

Coolant and lighting are on the list - I made a drawing for the spindle mount ring that will hold the lights and nozzles, but no time to implement them yet.

This is the spindle pulley with bearings. Naturally I spun it before clenaing and reinstallation on the machine. Naturally I missed the fact that the "throw out" bearing was bad and howeled with any torque applied. When I pulled the assembly (and belt and motor and housing and yoke) back off, I replaced all 3 bearings.

About the time I decided to just use the exsisting motor instead of a DC servo for the spindle, I used a transfromer to step up the 120V. I had a 480V VFD that I initially ran the motor on. When the motor ran really smooth, I acquired the larger 220V input VFD show here. It's still running from the wall plug in all of the photos below...

This is my PWM and direction control isolator that connects the DeskCNC board to the VFD. I use the 15VDC supply from the VFD to power a littlle op amp circuit that make 0-10V from the PWM. It's isolated to help with noise reduction

Rare photo of BarryFish actually doing some work. I searched for quite some time to get the hookup on the 12 wire motor with Japanese nomenclature. 1 microsecond after I had the motor rewired for low voltage, I noticed that the legend was plastered inside the motors j-box cover...

2 of the original axis motors after I had removed the sin-cos resolvers and the tachometer. I later added encoders and drove them with geckos. Unfortuneately when I got to the 3rd motor it was toasted. I elected to modify the tape-reel-drive motors shown below so that I'd have 3 that matched.

I really did not like having a seperate power box with thet Gecko's like everyone else seems to do. I don't like the idea of sending the high-frequency high-power motor signals from the control box up the same cable as the control signals. It just seemed a lot better to send DC power up to the motor and put the driver there instead of far away.

The original motors had a long extension on the back of the motor can to hold the tach and resolver. I cut it down, made up some spacers and a heatsink-cover and bolted the whole thing in to the "BarryServo Geck-Mos" shown here.

It's a tight fit, but it does fit. There's a fat capacitor in there too (not visible). I used the mini CPC connectors for the signals and power to the motors. I use 2 pins in parallel for the powers and grounds. The connector connects +, +, gnd, gnd, step, dir, step and dir common, fault, and fault return with it's 9 pins.

When I had the first one done I covered it with large shrink tubing and added the wiring label.... I still need to add the shrink to the other 2 motors. I need to brew up 3 more for the plasma table, but that's another story..

HEAT PROBLEM !
Oops, There is no heat problem detected so far.

I've read that Marris (Gecko driver-designer dude) does not like integrated electronics/motors, but for a mill application the motors very rarely see a fraction of their approximate 3/4 HP rating. My motors have nominal 20V rating and I'm sending 80 Volts to the geckos. I'd have great rapids that could flip the machine over if my encoders were a little lower resolution. Right now they are 4000 steps per revolution and the lead screws are 5TPI. That means that I need 20,000 steps to go 1". With the DeskCNC board, about the best I can rapid is 150IPM. If I ever make money with this thing, I might switch to the geckos with the built in step multipliers.

Before I got the Z axis motor running, I wanted to see the X and Y go. I rigged up the pen and beer case and drew the circles. Seems to be working. Beer need replacement though....

The Shiz and Gizmo, Superdog.

Late in night I got the Z installed. I wanted to try something that was easy, so I found this engraving bit and gave the machine a shot. The Y was reversed but that was an easy fix.

The aluminum bracket was the first production part. It's an iPod holder for a friends BMW. The subsequent steel part was made after the plate below but I wanted to keep the photos together.

Here it is making a plate for my buddies CNC machine spindle. He designed it in Ironcad and I transferred it to dxf. It's 3/8 steel.

The machine and plate as was. It's getting a little cleaner and neater as time goes by. Enlarge the photo to see the cad drawing used to make the plate on the screen - it was imported into DeskCNC and used directly to do the cut-out.

One of my goals was to be able to drill and tap an array of holes on the machine. I have not figured out how to get DeskCNC to run a G84 tapping cycle so I hand coded the Gcode

There’s 3 apparently common mixes of tapping on a cnc machine.

1 The way I did it.
a. Hand code the G-code.
b. Use a springy tap holder. It’s rigid rotationally, but springy in the Z. It stretches out about 1/4’ and compresses in about 1/4”. (then your tap compresses or stretches)
c. Calculate the correct feed rate
d. Get the spindle going with the tap just above the material Z+ 0.1
e. Go some distance at the feed rate. (there’s your timing)
f. Halt everything
g. Reverse and start feeding back to Z+ 0.1
i. (it’s better if you had some extra RPMs on the way in so the tap holder got some tension and a little lead – that way you have some space to compress on the way out due to spindle spin-up delay on the reverse)
(The Z runs at full speed instantly, so you loose what you gained on the way in while the spindle gets going)

2 With a servo spindle, a rigid tap holder (i.e.: a collet) and balls of steel. {“Rigid Tapping”}
a. Zoidberg can do this if it ever runs. You can rotate the spindle a part of a turn and index it so your thread starts are always at the same position.
b. Much safer for bottom tapping a blind hole.

3 Like #1 above, but using G84 (tapping cycle)

a. DeskCNC does not advertise that they do this, but there is a checkbox to enable a few extra g-codes in the machine set up.
b. Maybe I’ll fiddle around with this sometime.

Under TMI:
You need G code that looks like this:

Here's a piece of 3/4 steel that I cut for a miter saw modification that I did. It's really cool to be able to draw a shape and just cut it out without much regard to anything like tool diameters or sweeping radii.

Here's the automatic drawbar tightener assembly. I think ths this might be a early Kurt. Shown here after clean-up, lubrication and o-ring replacement. It was missing the impact wrench when I got the machine so I hackied up the northern tool unit to fit.

I don't have a lathe so I made a piece of shaft that pressed into the front bearing of the wrench housing. I held that bar with a collet and turned the whole housing down using the Enco and lathe tool held in the vise.

It still needs the reversing relay, air solenoid driver and wrench driver solid state relays. My approach is to just run AC power and air to the unit and send 5V control signals up to it for engage and rotate.

This is the begining of the machines front panel. The graphics are Corel Draw. The aluminum sheet is from a dumpster dive....(it still had the protective plastic sheet, seen here lifting at the hole edges)