Light Machine Corp. Benchman XTr (retrofit)

I made some major progress. I looked at the axes and was going to move things manually to get off the limits, but I was looking at the block diagram and I got to thinking. It really bothered me that the work light and the door didn't work, these seem so simple. I have a second Nextmove card that seems to stay in SW reset, but I swapped the PNP modules with the card I was using. Everything seems to work now except for two issues.

1. When facing the machine, if I jog the table, when I click on the right arrow, the table goes left, left arrow, table goes right, in arrow, table goes out, out arrow table goes in. The Z goes up with the up arrow and down with the down, so not sure if this behavior is normal.

2. Second thing is that the tool changer buttons on the front panel don't seem to work. they light up when pushed, but nothing happens. I can manipulate the tool changer to all positions with the SW, including homing the spindle, clamp, unclamp etc, just the buttons don't work, seems like it could be an interface card issue.

Thanks

Thanks, makes sense. I suspected that but wasn't sure.

I would check the J27 Connector on the main board and the J5 connector on the ATC card. Make sure they are fully seated.
I am attaching the wiring of the ATC front panel switches. Let me know if that solves it.

I re-seated J15 and now the platter moves up and down, and the drawbar clamp works. Now I need to check whether the signal is toggling for the index platter button. I haven't seen the platter index at all yet, It turns when the ATC homes, but I haven't seen it index. I need to dig into the sw a little more to see how it should act, and whether it can be indexed in SW.

I found out that J15 wasn't the problem, the ATC buttons only work when the Operate ATC dialog box is open. The two problems I have now are that the index platter button doesn't work, and the platter is about .22" too low to correctly engage the tool holder. I don't see any mechanical adjustment on the ATC, do I fix this by changing the home position of the spindle?

There really isn't any adjustment on the ATC other than the home position relative to the spindle head.
The 0.22" dimension you refer to, is that too low for the spindle head to engage the tool holder or is it something else?
The index platter will not work unless the toolchanger has homed.
There is a file in the system that calibrates the individual toolchanger position as +/- counts from the theoretical value.
I do not remember the file name, but Intelitek should be able to tell you the name.
Home the toolchanger, loosen the nut on the bottom of the platter and align tool 1 with the spindle head and then tighten the nut.

The home position for the spindle is to raise to the upper limit switch and slowly back down to the first index position.
There is a "toolchange" height parameter that is set in one of the .ini files, it is a different location than the home position.. Again, I do not remember the filenames or the actual parameters. Inrtelitek should be able to help with this also.

Hope this helps.

I found out that I needed to define some tools in the tool changer to get it to work., Now that I did that it indexes with the switch, and when I make an automatic tool change, the spindle goes to the correct height to make the change. Everything works great now. This is a fantastic machine. I really appreciate the help with getting it running.

Major progress here this week. I finally finished installing a subpanel in the garage and got the machine under power.

The good: Green lights everywhere I'd expect them to be in the back. The Z-Axis brake seems to be behaving itself. All the axis move, everything seems to work.

The bad: I'm going to need a large compressor. The spindle air curtain is causing an 80% duty cycle on my little 1HP compressor. It would be useful to know how much air that actually needs.

The Benchman software doesn't seem to like the Renishaw tool offset probe. Go to Probe Position seems to take 3 attempts to actually get there, and the touch-off doesn't complete correctly. The machine sees the probe contact and retracts Z, but doesn't register any position upon retract. This happens with either tool length probing or when trying to teach the machine the probe position. I suspect that the cable harness might need replacing - it's covered in a lot of electrical tape.

What else...? Oh, the main power switch, is there a bulb in it? It looks like there should be. And I noticed in my configuration that the X-axis follow error was 0.01 (not 0.1 that everyone else seems to have). Is that likely to cause problems? Finally, should Error Compensated Axis be checked? I seem to have 3 files that appear to be axis error offsets.

I do remember the air curtain requiring a large volume of air, but I cannot quantify it.

For the probe, I would certainly look at the cable first based on your description.
If you can give me the part number off of it, I can supply a document defining it.
I cannot really help with the software operation, I can build 'em, but I can't run 'em beyond basic fundamentals.
If the machine is seeing the probe contact and retracting the Z axis, it should certainly be recording the position, the probe interfaces directly to the external interrupt on the Nextmove card and is essentially asynchronous to all other operation.

There is a bulb in the main power switch, but some of the newer machines did not use my power supply design, so it may be disconnected.
If you can provide a photo of the left inside of your control box, I can give more information.

The X and Y axes should have the same following error, I do not remember the value, but they should be the same.

As long as the axis encoders have never been removed from the ballscrew, the error compensation should still be accurate.
If the encoder has been removed or "adjusted" the compensation table is useless.

Don