Mazak Dinosaur Progress & Questions

Wow. Wonderful stuff! Congratulations. More videos!

BigJohnT wrote:

Axis is a keyboard and mouse GUI, Touchy and Gomcopy (however is it spelled) are touch screen GUI's.

JT

It just looked so silly to have Touchy running on a 15-inch screen with 1024 resolution. Heck, each button was 3" across! My fingers are fat, but not that fat. Maybe on a 6" touchscreen. I did bump the resolution down a bit to make the Axis buttons appear bigger.

I don't recall seeing Gomcopy, though. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!

Here's a shot of what's going on with the spindle:
vid.me/BJK

And a picture of the re-purposed cabinet. I reused the air-air heat exchanger from the Mazak. The buttons are: Control power, E-Stop indicator, E-stop button (1 of 4 placed around the machine), and E-stop reset. The e-stop chain is a dual-channel category-0 system. So the main contactors are all opened, the drives are all given a seperate emergency stop signal (Safe-Torque Off), and EMC is also given the e-stop command.

The spindle motor is the very same 15HP, 4000 rpm Mitsubishi from the original mazak.

It takes 45 minutes to make a single pass, usually 3 passes per side (top and bottom) at 0.040" each pass.

That is quite an unusual machine. Did it start out as a milling machine?

Yes, I think it was a bridge mill back in the 80's.