Pete's Cincinatti Arrow 500 Retrofit...

Andy,
How would I see what the output of the Z PID is? I got a message from Billy telling me how to use the Halscope to tune the PID and using ff1 etc to tune the velocity mode we are using. Is it somehow in that method you can see this output. Pete spoke about the bias value adjustment as well. Gonna try it here today I hope. Still gotta modify my Y axis motor so I can get it installed into the machine, damn huge Milspec connectors LOL...peace

Pete

Andy,
Hey thanks man....ran into a little problem with my Y axis motor today but getting beyond it hopefully tomorrow. Will check out the Z axis once all three motors are installed and working. Peace

Pete

Okay folks a little delayed on the updates but here goes.. .
After getting all three axes and the spindle and coolant pumps working recently I was ready to put some fresh coolant into the machine and try to make some chips. Well just as soon as I got the third five gallon bucket poured into the coolant troughs I noticed it pouring out onto the floor. Really bummed out and had to very quickly clean up the mess. This lead to finding hundreds of tiny rust pinholes in the bottoms of the troughs. I then had some decisions to make.


What I settled on was a combination of some serious rust grinding coupled with some careful fig Welding of most of the holes followed by spraying with some stuff that apparently turns rust into primer,then following that with some more sanding. Finally I mixed up about a quart of epoxy resin and lined the bottoms of both troughs and painted it up the sides to hopefully permanently seal up the works. That happened this morning and went quite well. Tomorrow I will be following that up with three coats of some devcon bar rust industrial epoxy paint three coats to seal and protect it from further rust. With any luck at all this should permanent seal and protect my coolant troughs for the foreseeable future.

Hoping to get the painting done tomorrow and do some test runs with water the next day and then I can reinstall them into the machine and get back to the business of this retrofit. Really looking forward to making some chips with the monster here very soon.

Still sorting out the spindle motor setup with the vfd and still need to put a braking resistor on the z axis since there is no counterbalance on it and I should be at a point where I can start running and making test cuts with the machine. This coolant leak issue has been a real bitch but it is almost sorted finally. Peace

Pete

Okay sports fans, the coolant troughs are all sealed up and painted Ans have been reinstalled into the machine today. I then filtered the scavenged coolant and mixed up more to adequately fill the troughs. Once I got it all setup I fired up the VMC and put a bucket under the coolant nozzles on the mill table. Hit the flood button and the pump came on gushing some initially nasty coolant thru the lines that quickly cleared out to be nice clean blue coolant from the troughs. Pulled the bucket away and let it flow for a good while. Pump work great flood flow is real nice and I am very pleased with it.

Tonight I loaded up sheetcam and made a couple test patterns to cut on the mill initially in air then hopefully in aluminum. Was gonna do some air test cuts but couldn't find my damn USB cable for my phone to put the files onto like a flash drive. My old flash drive got crunched so until I find that damn USB I can't load the files. Probably find it in the morning and then can run some tests. Still lots to do here and gotta get back on tuning the spindle drive for this odd motor but glad to be able to run code now. Results soon....peace

Pete

Pete did you get it running yet? Your coolant troughs look pretty nice all cleaned up and painted. Sucks to not have a flash drive around. Might just want to throw it on your network and use something like google docs or a Samba share. I also couldn't find one of my many flash drives one night when I needed to test out a machine. Google docs was to the rescue. And on the plus side one the machine is tuned you can just upload your config to Google and not have to worry about loosing it in a computer meltdown.

Maglin,
Hey man good to see a friendly face here. Yeah the basic machine sans the toolchanger is now working. Still lots of fine tuning and control customization to do but I made a part and even a short video of the machine running in my photobucket account. Got a nice new flash drive as well as a new CNC vise for it and I picked up a 3/4 inch led edge finder without realizing I don't have a holder for it. Tried to make a adapter for it to fit another holder today but it did not go too well. Also have an annoying niggly air leak on the pneumatic oiled/dryer on the back of the machine I tried to fix twice now. Gonna hit it one more time tomorrow and if I cannot fit it she's probably coming off for some drastic surgery. The machine seems very precise so far the two milled pockets I made with it were both within a tenth or two which is just friggin' amazing to me. I just now gotta learn my way around the linuxcnc control and get it setup with the spindle encoder so I can rigid tap and start to implement the toolchanger. Already have some functions of the toolchanganger working including the power drawbar and the carousel ram. It is taking some time but progress is being made. Hope you are well. Peace

Pete

Okay fellas, A little update. Not much has been going on here with the VMC. Have been working on my house and my cars with little issues that needed attending to. The machine still seems to run well and I have used it a bit here and there. Still trying to find some good paying work for the machine to run but everything seems quite slow lately. I used it to machine my Stainless Steel flycutter that fits on one of my Cat40 face milling arbors and that went quite well. The machine drilled and I hand tapped the holes because I still don't have spindle feedback yet. Honestly I kinda needed the facemill flycutter head to allow me to surface the material for the encoder mount I designed for the machine. Now that the cutter head is finished and I ran some tests with it today I can get to work on the encoder mount. I used the flycutter to surface some sacrificial jaws for the CNC vise I bought. Tonight I drew up a short program to drill and counterbore the holes for the jaw bolts and I am gonna run the two pairs of vise jaws I have here for that.

I am also working on a fullsize router spindle mount because I used my last machine to do a lot of engravings and this machine only has the 6k spindle and with replacing bearings what it costs I wanted to be able to run some of the longish engraving programs I have done with the router spindle so as not to tax the machines spindle.. Also it might actually save me some money since that 7.5HP spindle motor probably uses some electricity. I have that adapter mount all cad drawn and hope to get it machined this weekend. Then I can test it and maybe make some extra money doing the cool automotive related badges and engraving I used to do with my RF45. I am using your typical Porter Cable 1.5HP 690 model router setup. Should do the trick okay. A side effect of the router attachment is that when I finally get around to machining my first guitar body I can do it on the VMC with some well placed vacuum LOL... Just trying to make the most out of this beast here. Wish I could afford one of the high speed cat40 air spindles they sell but they are quite pricey.

Other than that not much going on. I still have some errors from the spindle noise that I have not attempted to fix just yet but it is only occasional and does not seem to affect the machines performance at all.. Sure is nice to have the machine running. It made pretty short work out of cutting that 5/8 slot and angle surfacing the stainless steel body of that Flycutter. Took me forever on my old RF45 to do the same damn thing. Peace

Pete