Retrofitting a 1986 Maho MH400E

First of all no more jokes about my balls

37 per line is the correct number which gives a gap of 1.5mm.
The whole operation takes approximately 10-15 minutes and does not need any lubrication or auxiliaries.

- Count 37 balls in a jar and pour them into the nut having turned to a point where they can fall into the correct turn.
- Find the sweet spot where they just fit into the deflector.
- Use a non-magnetic needle, wire or screw-driver and push them all in.
- Turn the nut to the next pitch and continue

In my opinion it is perfect now with the P10 balls with diameter 3.51mm.
I can now still turn it with two fingers and sense a little pre-load, a little.
I think that someone has fiddled around before and filled in too few balls which lead to a jam that cracked one or more balls at the hardened deflectors.
The 240 balls before weren't enough, I'm sure. Now I have 259 in total.
(You can never have enough balls, lol)

If we are no longer allowed to discuss your balls, it looks like you're screwed!
Mark

It is a manual table. The hydraulic release for table and tool have been changed to manual pump (originally designed for duel acting cylinder to lift a truck cab). Scales where Philips and I changed for Chinese 1um Sino brand scales. Working great. Have not even started ini or Hal for table encoder. I am not good with that stuff. Most of my Hal and ini where cut and paste from examples.

Looks like brown is +5v, white is 0v. What are Ua0, Ua1, and Ua2? I'm assuming ref, A, and B.
I don't mind not using a reference. Want to be able to manually home table to 0 degrees and have DRO function separate from cnc functions.
Machine is running on 240v single phase. 100A breaker.
I'm in Pennsylvania, so yes it's cold but garage is heated : )

Mccartymachine1 wrote: Looks like brown is +5v, white is 0v. What are Ua0, Ua1, and Ua2? I'm assuming ref, A, and B.
I don't mind not using a reference. Want to be able to manually home table to 0 degrees and have DRO function separate from cnc functions.

On Heidenhain linear scales, Ua 0 is the reference, so that is probably consistant across evrything they do.If you have the ref signal you may as well input it to LinuxCNC. If you input that to LinuxCNC, you could probably quite easily have a workflow to manually zero that axis with a lot less hassle than setting up a DTI, and probably more accurate and repeatably.

What is the benefit of having a C axis on a CNC? I can see the benefit of a B axis, and even more so stacked A and B, A and C or B and C, but a C axis alone doesn't seem to bring much to the party that you can't do with interpolation. I guess the MAHO's do have the head rotation as a manual B axis, so if the job needs it, and you have the patience, with a C axis you can do pretty much any 5 axis indexing job.
Mark

When you start the machine you must home all the axis, including the table c axis. Using the index you can align the table t-slots compared with the rest of the machine very accurately, and not have to use the indicator on every startup.
On e VMC the c axis (alone) is not that useful, but on a machine with tilting head and horizontal spindle a rotary table is very useful.
John