Spindle drive choke connections.

[tiffyted]

The spindle drive choke for the paradjust drive is in the left end of the machine. There are two wires that have been extended from it, one goes to the paradrive unit, but I have no idea where the other goes. Can anyone advise where this should be connected? Also is there any reason why it is fitted in the position it is, and not on the parajust chassis as designed?

Thanks

[angel-tech]

they're usually grey wires, by i can't remember exactly where they go other than to the parajust inverter.

[tiffyted]

I have solved the connections problem and it may help others so I'll post the answer.

One wire from the choke goes to the large blue capacitor. On my machine the screw for fixing the wire was yellow.There are 2 black wire and 1 blue wire connected to it. The other wire is connected to the multi-pin socket at the rear of the controller. This on my machine was spliced to a short block wire terminated just to the rear of a blue wire.

I am currently converting this machine to MACH3 using all the original electronics. This has meant producing a couple of small PCB's to interface the power for the Parker drives to the computer breakout board and small relay board for the Parametrics vfd. Just now completing the final wiring and hopefully all will be fine.

[angel-tech]

If you get stuck at all give me a shout, i've converted quite a few of these to Mach 3.

What are you going to use for the speed adjustment, i use diycnc's V3 spindle board for the 0-10v. I'm not sure if you need the isolated version, but i would use it anyway.

[tiffyted]

I have now completed the conversion to Mach3. The original parts I used were:

The main power supply.

The PC1601 DC power PCB.

The original parker drives.

The original parametrics powerjust VFD. I mounted the choke on the baseplate of the VFD using the original mounting. It seems OK.

The original Astec power supply.

Other parts used.

Breakout board - very early version of cnc4pc board Powered by the Astec power supply 5v.

Speed controller - cnc4PC C6 optoisolated speed controller

Index pulse board - cnc4pc board. I made a purpose mounting for the opto and a aluminium disc with a slot for the signal mounted on the rear of the spindle.

DIY board for optoisolation of breakout board to parker drives.

The conversion was pretty straight forward once I had sorted the various connections from the main PSU and sorted out where I would use them. I decided to retain the original PC1601 board although there a some unused outputs. I used the 12v isolated supply from that board for the speed control and the 24v output for the parker drives.

Only real problem I had was setting up Mach3 speed control parameters. In the end I settled for 1000 steps, 1500 velocity, 500 acceleration and 4 pulse width. One spindle pulley, min 100rpm max 2000rpm and 1 ratio.

All in All I am quite pleased with how it turned out and the only real cost was time, wire and a few bits from Maplin for the isolatio board. I milled a small pcb for it. If anyone is interested I could post the simple layout, or for a few pieces of silver make one.

[angel-tech]

great to see this.
I've done a few of these and although they're not the easiest conversion, it just goes to show you don't have to spend mega money changing all those usefull working parts.