I thought the eccentrics were on the bottom because the holes on the bottom were the only ones big enough for them to fit in.
Yeah, Yeah, must be us Aussies look at things upside down...180º rotation of the plate should sort it out
Despite following your learned advice & turned them 180 degrees, my attempts to be a rebel are a failure. I have a weird problem with these new plates. I am using 3 wheels top & bottom plus 2 acme nuts just will as you use for your Y. I cannot get the wheels to adjust properly.There is no way the eccentrics can get all wheels to contact the C beam. I removed the middle sets & tried with only 4 sets. It still won't work. Is there some silly little thing I'm missing here?
Your'e not missing anything, they're just difficult to adjust. Put your assemble together loosily with every thing just snug, put the edge with the standard wheels down on a flat surface with a section of cbeam inserted and push down on the standard wheels with the cbeam and tighten the standard wheels, so the standard wheels are making the same contact with the cbeam. adjust the eccentric side untill they are just touching the cbeam (just the slightess pressure will spin the wheels) and snug up a bit more. Flip it over and check the standard side is slipping the same amount and adjust if needed. Go back to the eccentric side and adjust them just a little more and tighten. Making sure the pairs of eccentric are adjusted the same. (this is where a bit of white-out or simular on the opposite side to the engraving is handy). You will find the wheels on the mouth side of the cbeam will slip more then the back side wheels. Just make a compromise, to get it as close as possible. Good luck and let me know if this makes sense. \ /
@gwandad, there have been a few reports of the holes on the plates being too wide for the vslot. If Moag's suggestions don't solve the problem, you might contact the parts store for resolution.
@Moag I spent some hours this morning trying to adjust it with your method. I wasn't what I would call successful. I could adjust so that the wheels just barely touched the surface on all corners, which I must admit was a big improvement but the lack of preload worried me, especially since I intend to cut aluminium with this. While this will probably upset quite a few of the purists, the bush mechanic in me took the plates over to the drill press and opened up the mounting holes for the fixed wheels and put eccentrics in both top and bottom. I was then able to adjust with what I think is a fair amount of preload. I had carefully marked the flats on the adjusters and made sure that I moved each eccentric exactly the same amount. While the result won't be tested for a few days yet, it appears as though it's going to work okay and at least in the short term it's made me happy!
@Rick 2.0 I hadn't read your note until this evening. As you'll see in the reply to Moag I found my way around the problem. Not nicely, but hopefully effectively. That fault would certainly explain my problem. If there was any publication of that fault,I didn't see it. It's a bit late now. The distance from the store also makes it a big problem. Given the value of the item and the costs of return postage plus the inevitable delays just makes it not worthwhile. It would be better to buy another one known to be good. I suppose I could strip the machine completely again and compare the 3 plates that I'm using to see if the fault is in more than one but at this stage. I can't see me doing that either. Hopefully this will warn other people. One would have hoped that the store had checked the plates in stock, but I only received this plate this week, which makes it bloody annoying!!!!
Hey @gwandad don't worry mate, openbuilds will look after you and I would doubt very much they would want the plate back. I think the best thing to do is grab some calipers and do an accurate measurement of the problem area in question and report back to the openbuilds team, I guarantee they will look after you if it is a manufacturing fault. I had a similar stuation with one of the stepper motors in my shipment, they shipped a new one to me wthin the hour of reporting it. They did not want the faulty one returned. It was also sent on a priority shipment too and receipted here within 6 days including the weekend here in Australia, these guys are here to support you, I can personally vouch for that. So rest assured they will take care of it for you. And on your ability to make it work with your bush mechanic skills, that is truly a sign of somebody with excellent engineering skills mate, fantastic work indeed. Cheers Glenn.
@gwandad, sounds like something is out of spec , with the most likely candidates being the wheels, plate, eccentrics or a combination. With my machine after adjustment the marked side opposite the engraving are at around the ten or two o'clock position when the eccentrics are on the top side \ / ... So defiantly contact the openbuilds part store, so they can sort it out for you. I went though the models in fusion to see if there's a error there without finding anything that would stop you getting your wheel down in contact with some preload, so all I can think of is that it is CAM setup problem, worn or calibration machine problem at the factory. Target size ~ 100.6 mm between centres Table of measurements I worked out on fusion. Sorry, I know this won't solve your problem, but loving the bush mechanic in you. Good luck Moag
@Moag. This really shows me up. My standard measuring device is a old plastic ruler from when my kids were in Primary School! I know the eccentric hole is about 7.12 mm. My metric drill set doesn't have one of those, so I ratted through my old collection of Imperial & number drills until I found one the ruler said it was about right (and was a neat fit in the hole) so I used it. I don't know what it's official size is (they're a bit rusty, living in an old tin) I had 2 old large eccentrics & one 6mm (needing 2 sizes of spanner) so, being upside down & a rebel, I put them on top. Hopefully, now that problem is behind me, I won't need to add any more of my technical expertise to this forum until I need help on something else. It's been fun.Thanks.
Sounds more precise then the standard rule on a packet of tally ho . It doesn't matter how you solve a problem, just as long as you get there. I spent a fair bit of my life in remote very locations, with no power, radio, phone, tv, internet and they were possibily some of the best times of my life making do with what was at hand. I'm so glad you shared as it can't be fixed if you don't know its broken! Talking about broken stuff, I think I've finally sorted out my chinese spindle and VFD after have the the wrong one voltage wise sent, then breaking the replacement VDF in my rush to get it up and running, but its replacement is up and running finially so expect a how to wire up a chinese spindle and program a VFD soonish. So I even fall down a random rabbit hole sometimes.
Let me know what size Spindle (water cooled or air cooled) and VFD @gwandad , I ended up with Huanyang 0.8Kw 220V 400Hz Spindle and an 1.5Kw 220v single phase to three phase Huanyang YM series Inverter... try saying that quickly. The YM series inverter is their new compact version with a handy speed control dial on the front control panel. You will need a submersable pump if you get the water cooled spindle and some easily sourced 8mm clear PVC tubing (from memory, but I will check), a bucket, at least 2 m of good quality shielded cable for between the VFD and Spindle, a soldering iron, solder and heat shrink. The shielded cable of suitable specs was the hardest to source by far, with most of it sold by the thousand meter roll, but you might have more luck near the big smoke. I ended up with 2m of LAPP KABEL 0036425 Multicore Screened Cable, Servo, Transparent, 4 Core, 16 AWG (1.25mm^2) from http://au.element14.com which is major over kill and at the limit of what you can terminate on the spindle size. 0.75mm^2 (19AWG) might be a better choice if rated for over 300v with good shielding. Oh you will need a standard plug and lead from the mains wall outlet to VFD (10amp); i used a old computer power lead in good nick from the tip shop.
I have no idea of the brands. They are "no name" items from eBay. The spindle is 1.5KW 60 X 210mm air cooled. I've got 6 metres 4 core to go from the inverter to spindle via the X & Y cable chains.. If that causes a problem then I'll feed it overhead with the 2.5" vacuum line. I've got on order the cable chain that opens so that will relieve any drama.I must get my new machine into the system sometime soon. It's a metre square, acme thread with a few bells & whistles. The basic cnc was working (just!) when I saw your gantry, so I pulled mine apart, ordered bits & rebuilt. So here I am!
@gwandad and crew, thanks for all the helpful feedback here we will check into this to see what may be happening on the production side to sort it out. @Moag Look forward to the spindle/VFD tut, thats going to be a great help Thanks again
@Moag Further to your problem re shielded cable at reasonable prices try Homann Designs!, Your preferred CNC Supplier for Aus. supplies. This man has also got some wiring diagrams G540 to VFD which is just what I need (diagram EN010). All worth a look at.. He has a lot of other diagrams that we don't find very often
Sorry for taking so long to get this together, but here's a basic guide to setup a Chinese VFD and Spindle in pdf format. @gwandad, @GrayUK, @Kyo, @Aussie58, @Anthony Bolgar and @Mark Carew: let me know what you think and point out any mistakes Cheers.
As I would have expected, you have done an excellent job explaining the in's and out's of the Chinese spindle and VFD. I have duly saved it for future reference and am sure it will be very handy when I get my spindle. Perhaps you should put a copy into the Useful Information / Resources area, just in case I mislay my copy. Once again Many Thanks Gray
Excellent PDF.. A lot of detailed information all in one place. Will be adding the pdf to my document collection.. Thanks
Thanks Mate. A great job.Mine is a HY series inverter & this all checks out OK for this model as well. A really thorough piece of work!
Thanks Team Openbuilds for your kind words. Cheers Mate and glad to hear it worked out. A couple of questions well more then a couple @gwandad if you don't mine. Did you get a (English) manual with your HY series inverter? Did it come with the speed dial (potentiometer not phone)? Are the main input and output terminals different? I've made some changes to the VFD/Spindle "How To guide PDF" as I would like to make it as complete as possible before adding it to the Tutorial section if you get what I mean. Attachment below of latest version, the bold underlined blue text are links. So gwandad, if you go to PD177,178,179 & 189 are there any error codes stored? Cheers Mate.
Thought I'd see if Fusion 360 would play fair with my setup today... Raspberry Pi with 7" Raspberry Touch Screen running bCNC, talking to a Smoothie Board, talking to DQ542MA Stepper Drivers running High Torque Steppers. Test was a simple half sphere bowl, 30mm diameter with a 6mm 2 flute carbine bit at 15000RPM in some fast growing plantation Pinus radiata. The bottom row, was playing around with "Adaptive clearing" (man, does that take out material fast ) and the top was "Adaptive clearing with a Ramp finish path". Looks like I will have to work out how to get rid of that little nipple on the bottom, but not to bad for a first go.
That Looks Great @Moag... Good to see you making some mess !! I haven't quite got to the cutting stage yet but not far off now, gaining a little more confidence with this CNC stuff every day and just taking it slowly... I think this might be one of the first C-Beam XLarge Videos posted on Youtube !! Take a look at all the pretty lighting including the Limit Switches (Hall Effect Sensors), this thing comes with it's own Christmas Lights... LOL. Here's the machine trying to find a place to call home. Cheers Glenn.
Thought I would try something a bit more complex to cut out... curvy 3D/2.5Dee of course..., just to make things harder, near the limits of Z travel with my current setup, using some kiln dried Eucalyptus regnans Australia’s tallest trees, which is a long way short of the easiest timber to machine. Modeled a small oval bowl 80mm long x 54mm wide x 27mm deep with a thin slightly wavy lip, lofted down about 8mm that kind of looked like this... Thought I would see how rough a finish with thin edges using adaptive clearing would give, after some fiddling around it came up with a messy looking web of passes that looked like this... and some stats like this... Attached a 6mm Ball 2 flute Carbine bit with a CEL of 12mm, hanging out a little over 28mm. Whacked or I should say stuck a piece of stock to my machine, opened bCNC, clicked Home, jogged to the centre of my stock, jogged the Z down till it was just touching, zeroed out XYZ, loaded the .nc file, jogged Z up 5mm, clicked scan (all good), started the spindle (dialling it up to 22000RPM)... Held my breath and clicked Play. - First mistake... it slowly jogs back to home then back to the cut start position (note to self, should take more notice of David the swarfer ), not to bad really as it gave the spindle some more time to warm up. - Second mistake... when it got around to cutting the little wavy lip, it was doing some sudden changes of direction that were too extreme for my liking... I could see this when doing the cam simulations, but thought I would see what it looked like in real life Third mistake... failed to work out maximum depth for my limit stop on Z, so hit it on the last and deepest helix plunge and all stopped with a big red error alarm... "Oh well at least I found out the limit stop works". So Turned spindle off, moved the limit switch a little higher, exited bCNC, reopened to clear the fault (rough and ready way to do it), re homed then clicked run again and watched it cut air mainly (slightly out in the Y from what I could gather) till it got to where it stopped, through my stupidity Finished the job, not to shabby for a test run, but still lots to learn