my m4 Mazak lathe

So after 3 weeks of mostly wiring and reading I finally did an actual paying job on the M4 lathe yesterday.

The company I work for "Readings Engineering" bought the m4 a year ago in working order, it had come from a "Ford engine plant selloff" and seems to have been used in the toolroom for many years as the slideways are in excellent condition. However being as it was made in 1984 the electronics were only just holding up. 6 months after getting it we replaced the spindle motor and drive with a Vacon a/c unit.

So when the main board in the control was going to cost 4k for a replacement - which may not fix the problem - I mentioned emc....

I knew of emc since I saw it on "Slashdot" many years ago. Being a Linux user I understood most of the terminology from go.

The work done by other people on this site is what really convinced me to retrofit the m4, and the fact that we ain't had much work on lately ( but it's piled up now).

So first up I found that there was a lot of excess wiring in the cabinet. The bar feeder that came with the machine (from new) had it's own control. This control was also inside the cabinet, and not used. Saved some money by using the old relays with new bases from Finder, all the 110v electrics were stripped out and 240v equivalents installed (fans, etc) -Though I'm not sure of what voltage the hydraulic solenoids run from.

having convinced the boss, I bought ...
A 17" touchscreen
A new pc in parts, gigabyte mb, Phenom 2 4x chip, fast ram, a 32mb ssd, and a printer port card.
A Mesa 5120 card and two I/o daughter cards, and a servo daughter card. I got a isio card too but couldn't get it to work.
A 5 metre USB extension cable and a hub so I can connect the touchscreen at the control to the pc in the cabinet.
I also needed several power supplies for things in various places. For example, +/- 12v for the servo drives. This was supplied previously by the old control.

hurdles...

I couldn't install emc on the new computer, -the onboard LAN card needed to be disabled as it wasn't supported.
Mmmmmm.
I found that my "Vacon spindle drive didn't accept pwm, so, give it a voltage eh, but couldn't do so as the servo thread is running at 100000000 or whatever . - so I found that there was a Modbus card for the NXS spindle drive...... After another day of reading,and then enabling debug messages for modbus. I found a site that explained the error codes. - "Simply modbus"

My current problem is that I can't do threading as the spindle encoders Z channel isn't working, but !
I've found a 24v proximity sensor on the z axis that isn't used, I've hooked it to a tag on the spindle to get a once per rev signal, but! I can't send this directly to the encoder channel on the daughter card as it is 24v not 5v, but! Finder sell a 24v transistor relay (0.2ms on 0.6ms off) so I can run it thru that and back into the Mesa servo daughter card as a 5v signal.

I just got that tclgui pgm, for macro cycles and it is cool, I'm sure that after 6 more weeks of use and thoughtful configuration most people in the shop will be able to use it.

So I figure that 3weeks for the full conversion -it can now do paying jobs, is pretty good for one person.

And now I don't have to read up on stuff every night, I reckon I might get some posts done on this forum .
lol

Thanks for all the informative posts on this site.







I got the pinouts for the tra60 servo drives from a forum here somewhere ( thanks heaps), I

hi

thanks for letting us know of a new grate retrofit

sounds like the TRA60s have same pinout as my TRA30s thanks for letting me know, it did take me many hours to trace and decode there meanings glad it helped someone else out.

will be nice to see some photos of your retrofit glad im not the only one that removed miles of unused cables from the machine

rob

pics

pic2

shown is the Vacon drive, fitted before the retrofit, and all the shinny blue relay bases from finder.
i got an option C aux board -for modbus communication.

pic3

here u can see i used an old case, so the cards have somthing to mount to, the blue thing on the right is a rs232- rs485 converter.
i used a 5i20 card, and 1 parallel card for control i/o etc.

pic4

What a nice looking retrofit! Do you have vid of it up and running?

Regards,

Will R.

What [DISPLAY] section do you used with touch screen?
What is the touchscreen model?
What about touchscreen drivers?

the touchscreen is an lG L1510BF i will have to look, but u add a definition for it in some usb autodetect file somewhere. i use kvkbd for editing, and find it quite good.

also.....

recently one of the tra60 servo amps failed, so i upgraded the motors/drives to baldor components.

i find their stuff pretty good, aside from them sending the wrong parts twice, on their third attempt they sent all that i needed, and a bottle of oil, and some motor brushes??

ill post a vid, and get back to u on that config, -wasn't online much last week due to broken lathe.