Retrofitting a 1986 Maho 400E

Hello David
I removed the horizontal spindle out of my Maho 700C milling machine. I guess for the fourth time. All because I cant get the hydraulic tool changer to work.
I have an English version of the manual on the Maho 700C The same explains the machine in great detail but an omission is how to remove the tool change spindle and the spring washers that activate the tool gripper.
I cant see how to get it apart so I can get to see the possibly broken spring washers. I can not see anything wrong and in my view it seems like trapped air in the system. I have tried to bleed the system but with no luck. The vertical spindle tool changer works as it should. Today I put the spindle in a hand press and compressed the spring washers on their spindle. I can see the hydraulic piston move but can't see how to get it apart

Further David
Further there are three very small Allen headed grub screws in the spindle. too small for my Allen keys. The same are flush with the surface of the shaft. they seem like a machinist reference mark but I just don't know.
Seem like I am going backwards on this job.
cheers Chris

There is a specifically Maho forum here, which is all about keeping them original.

www.maho24.at/
 

Thanks Mark,
I had a quick look at the link and I'll have to spend a few days looking at it. I've already downloaded what looks like the circuit diagrams for my model Maho. I wish I'd known before. I used a similar but very different one for a 600 to help my rewiring. But there are so many variations! As you recall, a lot of mine wiring was botched by whoever refitted the Heidenhain in replacement the the Philips controller. No wiring ferule numbers and all the wiring either orange or blue.And lots of redundant wiring and relays left in place.

For Chris: I use Firefox for my browser. If it notices the language as different to your native one it puts at  the right in the box where you put the web address, a translate button that will translate from German to English and many others. It works very well, which is something that didn't before AI. I'd go to Marks link and look there for your issue.
I think you are telling me that you have the ram and spring assembly apart as I show on page 171 near the bottom. I didn't pull mine part further than shown in the photo, so I can't help further.
But both retraction systems work simultaneously when you energize the tool change hydraulics. So I would try connecting it back onto the hydraulic elbow at the rear again, but with it outside the machine, then activate the tool change so you can see what it tries to do.
Cheers,
David

Hello David
No further in removing the springs on my Maho 700C
After getting no progress in getting the hydraulic tool changer working I hung the spindle from a crane and connected the hydraulic lines in reverse. Almost straight away I noticed a hydraulic leak. Not yet fixed but likely the cause of my problem
I would never have seen the leak when the spindle housing was in place in the machine. A new o ring is required
thanks for your help
Cheers Chris

Hi Mark,I watched you re-grease the spindle on Youtube. I don't have much luck there as most of my post are removed in a few seconds. I haven't figured why.But I noticed your bespoke hand wheel. On mine it is held on with an off the shelf detent. Easy and neat.
David 

I'm browsing through your build of the lathe and I think somewhere there you got into a discussion of ChatGPT.
I've been feeding AI's G code for a while now to see how it goes. It's still hopeless. And I noted you mention it didn't understand subprograms. That also applies to program flow in general.
It occurred to me that in most cases where it's scraping the entire knowledge on the planet, it usually gets to see a coding  problem and attached it sees a printout of the answer.
In our case the "printout" is actually the movements of the machine itself. So I suspect what it needs to train on is a video of the machine movements with a picture in picture of a block of execution concurrent with what that block does on the machines move.
Not likely to scrape that currently off the internet I suspect.
But there are AI programs that now do very realistic art, movies and presentations of people who are dead saying modern speeches etc.
So it should be possible to combine both types of AI to make really fantastic CNC programs?.

You've seen how I usually put a lot of comments that explain every line of my G code I think?
If I remove the comments the AI is hopeless. It will give a vaguely generic statement of what some of the lines mean. If I leave the comments in it does better, but if you look you see that has just cleverly reworded the comments. It does no better with the code at all.

Maybe someone in the LinuxCNC community knows someone in the AI community who could run with the concurrent video/ block by block idea. Nearly every CNC machine on earth uses G code and it would be great if we could just get an AI to program them all.

Cheers.
David

Hi Mark,
I watched one of your Youtube videos again on the wonderful tool made for you by the guy in Malta. Nice to have friends like that.
A lot of good comments there. But I don't think you can add photos to the comments. So I'll stick my nose in here instead.
It's and area that makes my head swim. But it seems to me that the method is really just about making the quill square to the table. The vertical head on our machines only rotates around the Y axis, but on many Bridgeports it can also  rotate around the X axis. In that case you could use the device to make the quill perfectly square to the table. But you could also tilt their table to any angle (some can do that) and tilt the head to be perfectly square to that using  your device. Then you could use the quill to drill nice holes. You might do that to fit an oversized object perhaps? But it would do nasty things to the drill if you moved the knee while drilling. An extreme case example. Feel free to call me and idiot if I'm seeing it wrong.
My machine has that nice taper roller grinder style quill, which has a slight preload. So no looseness, but it will still have non repetitive run-out errors due to the various manufacturing errors in rollers etc.
On my machine you can see there is a detent knob on the head tilting. It clicks home at zero degrees on the tilt dial. When I put my dial clock on it then and swing it I get almost perfect alignment in the X direction. Big surprise! The head rotation clamps just like yours but with 4 bolts. You can see they scribed the zero mark on the head after they did the alignment by the missing paint.
I've added a photo of when my rotary table is removed. You can see the 8 bolts that clamp it on (so I don't misplace them). There are keys on the rotary table that fix the tilt when it's assembled. You can see it's not a dovetail system. I suspect I could align the table sag by removing that array of bolts along the bottom and putting shims between that X slide and the bearing rails.

Cheers,
David
 

Hello David
t seems we have been writing under Linux CNC forum and possibly a bit off topic.
If you are happy to continue our conversation please advise me on how best to contact you.
Thank you Cheers Chris McMullen

I agree. At the rate I'm going I'm liable to get kicked off!
You can contact me at:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Or better on Skype at:
david.jensen11 although that is going off air next month and I will be migrated to Teams personal or Teams free it seems.
Skype is better for me as I'm slow and hopeless at typing. You might need to refine the Skype address to Sydney.
Cheers,
David