The changer takes 8 tools. 4 of which are regular (radial) tools and 4 axial for boring or drilling. Both types of tool are held in place with grub screws. You need to pack the radial tools appropriately to set the height. I made an adaptor with a morse 2 taper which fits in to one of the axial hole...

I'm looking for a Triac with ATC (Like many people I suspect!).

I'd prefer a Fanuc controller - but could go down the Mach route, so that's less important.

Anything / anywhere considered.

Si

Don't know how similar they are - but I have the original VDU from my PNC3 controller (card & tube) which worked OK. Post a photo of your board - and I'll see if it's the same!

Si

I looked at doing this - just feed 5v in to one of the 5v lines on the processor board - and hay presto. Trouble is, it draws a lot of current - 4A IIRC. You are better off just fitting a switch in line with the VDU to switch that off. The power consumption of the original PSU is only marginally hig...

The actual spindle speed isn't that important - it only needs to know the phase (so it can start cutting in the same place on each cut). My guess would be that one of the opto sensors on the spindle is duff. It has one which reads 100 or so little holes to measure the speed plus another one which pi...

Solved it! Mach seems to expect the ON (+5v at the input) time to be shorter than the OFF time. I had assumed that the active high or low setting would fix that - but it seems not. Put the output of the opto or inductive sensor through a hardware inverter - and it works perfectly. The inductive pick...

Hi I’m after the front panel ( the key board ) some one when I power down the machine losses all its positioning data and to re zero it I have to move x and z axis through its steps twice it goes from six hundred and something to zero but instead of then going to minus it just counts down again Tha...

I pretty much have my Easiturn running under the control of Mach now - but I'm having problems with the closed loop spindle control. Essentially, it reads correctly up to 870rpm then if you up the demand speed to say 900rpm, the indicated speed halves to read 450rpm. In closed loop - mach thinks it'...

What do you need to know?

Si

That looks ideal! Particularly with the Myford chuck adaptor - you could do just about anything!

Si

Yes - use a charge pump! Without it, when I switch on the PC, the spindle drive goes to full speed for about 100ms as well as random blips on the step/direction. The coolant relay stays on until Mach starts. It's about the only safe way to operate with a PC. Not got a copy of Mach in front of me - b...

A couple of months ago, I bought an Easiturn lathe on eBay. It works perfectly - and has executed some beautiful machining since then. However I've been frustrated by the PNC3 controller. I guess in the 1980's - it was marvelous, but these days the user interface seems very clumsy. The program entry...

Last night - I had the drives operating under Mach with the CNC4PC board. Although I'm converting a Lathe - the principle is the same for a Mill. I have to wait for some more connectors to arrive tomorrow for the spindle, home, coolant. The home sensors are inductive and require another simple circu...

As Martin says - that's exactly how it should behave!

Si

Although I don't have a particularly precision level - I reckon mine 'sags' in the middle by about 1.5 thou. From my point of view - that's fine - but I did wonder if just changing the torques of the bolts which hold it to the bench might make that much difference - if I get particularly bored, I'll...

A small one!

Why do you need a rotary table - since you can interpolate any hole size and use the existing axes to do pretty much anything a rotary table can do?

I can see using an indexing head as an additional axis - so maybe you mean using it with the axis horizontal?

Si

Thanks - that's brilliant (on both counts).

Actually, it makes sense - the max resolution of the original is 0.005mm and the drivers are half step - so 200 step per mm.

Si

BTW Si, hows the retro fit going on your easiturn? Just about gathered together all the bits I need. CNC4PC card arrived this week. Taken original controller apart - decided to keep most of it intact and just replace CPU keyboard & interface boards with breakout board - and keep the rest. Sockets f...

Does it do the same thing if you run the program without cutting anything? Does it still do it if you set an offset in the X & Z axes (such that it's using a different bit of the lead screws)? Does it do it if you use a G01 instead of G00 with a slower feed rate? I'm guessing it's just loosing steps...

That seems to be the long and the short of it! The spindle encoders usually seem to have two sensors. One which generates lots of pulses per revolution and the other, a single long pulse. You can ignore the former and just plug the latter into Mach. In practice, to long as the voltage to the inverte...