Maho CNC Conversion: THE MOVIE!!

[Music] roll on two oh i forgot to wet the sponge [Music] today is the day we finally do the maho update let's head over to the that was fast wasn't it and you know why the maho is a lot closer now it's no longer by the role outdoor with one foot out the garage it's traded places with the router i am excited to announce that we're moving in together before we get too far a quick update for those viewers among us who maybe don't watch the news or read the papers about a year ago i dragged an old rusty german into my life and just like i do with all my guests i gave it a hot bath fed it and rewired its brain to do my bidding i converted my german to cnc i'm not 100 finished still have like a million other things i want to do with this thing but you've been asking for an update video i've mentioned an update video and if i put this off any longer well there'll just be more stuff to talk about and it'll get intimidating in fact i don't even know where to start there are videos of each of the axis conversions if you're into that sort of thing but today's video although probably all over the place is meant to be more holistic big picture i'm super happy with this thing so far one or two kinks to iron out still but despite some of the colorful language throughout the conversion all in all i don't regret taking it on i'm learning a ton absolutely love the servos and i think the machine will be a great addition to the shop the router was great but this thing in comparison could eat the router for breakfast and still have room for pie since i mentioned servos let's start with the access conversion there are ac servos on each axis we'll get to these details in a second but only two of the axes have ball screws the x and the y the z axis is using the original machine screw and i hate it yeah yeah you're right i should have changed it out when i was in there you don't have to rub it in i mean mechanically the z-axis it's right on no complaints but it's just so dang loud check this out let's do the x-axis first i'm jogging with the arrow keys but when i use the mpg the clicks on the mpg are actually louder than the axis that's a servo driven ball screw you're listening to compare that to z headphone users you might want to turn your volume up for this again mechanically z-axis does the job just fine no backlash thanks to all the weight on that screw but that sound just drives me up a wall a vertical wall at that since we're here and seeing as you guys brought up the z-axis weight i did add some gas springs to help counterweight the table and knee there's one on each side they're i think a hundred pounds each but not completely offsetting the table weight there's probably still a hundred pounds on that screw easy and that's the one for the other side they're mounted at an ever so slight angle back in towards the dovetails it's not much but i didn't want them to be putting any kind of a torque on the gib and dovetails on the z-axis they help a lot with the accelerations of the machine do zilch for the noise downside i do lose about two inches of travel with these because they're about two inches too short for this application but it was the best i could find at the time i have my soft limits set to stop a smidge shy of tearing these things in half so gas springs could be a video all on their own but for now you can consider these as pretty close to constant force springs which means unlike like a big compression spring these put out the same force no matter how far you compress them second when you can always install gas springs so the rod is down these according to legend have a bit of oil in them and it's best to keep that oil down on the seals rather than on the butt end where it's not doing very much at all if there's nothing else you take away from this video which brings us to the y-axis this might look like a servo-driven ball screw but in reality it's a can of worms i have absolutely no idea why but this machine is about to get its third y-axis ball nut replacement keep in mind this machine is pushing 50 years of age and at 50 a ball nut replacement is nothing to sneeze at listen to this crunchy is a great sound for a breakfast cereal not so much for ball screws again i have no idea why this thing is chewing up ball nuts i may have the accelerations a bit too high this axis is the lightest and i don't know maybe it's deforming those poor bearings no clue and if you go back and watch that again listen closely it'll do two things helps my video statistics and you may notice it only makes that crunching sound in one direction i don't know what that means but maybe that's a clue for you believe it or not this is solid steel [Music] well now that didn't sound very good at all i don't know how much you heard because i likely fast forwarded through it that was a half inch end mill running a half inch deep slot in cold rolled steel nothing to sneeze at but at the same time shouldn't have been that big of a deal for this mill but i learned a few things here first dull end mills should just be thrown away but more interestingly perhaps i think i'm really seeing that dying y screw in action so on the pushing stroke the direction that i think it was making the noise can you see those ripples that chatter back there yeah i don't see it on the id but on the od it's having some trouble i guess maintaining that position it's bouncing that screw is bouncing i think the ball nut is shot on the pull direction it's not great but it's a little bit better because that was a high speed steel end mill i needed to run that with coolant okay fine it was mostly water but there was some coolant in there i had to install the chip pan i haven't had this on the machine because i haven't needed it but this sheet metal cookie tray is making a heck of a racket i put some weight in there and that helped a little bit this is a solid steel ball maze for my kids i like to leave the sharp edges and the burrs on there makes it a little more exciting for them and it should be a lot more fun than the last one i made them i was surprised at how fast they solved this one i've got a new bull nut coming and when i swap that out i think i'm also going to get rid of the belt drive and do the direct drive thing there shouldn't be but maybe this arrangement is forcing some sort of misalignment the reason i went with a belt in the first place was to fold this motor axis back on itself not have it all sticking out the back here i know it doesn't seem like a lot it's a rather short servo but sticking out the back if you walk past this thing and you're not paying attention let's just say a servo to the rib cage is something i'd like to avoid let's talk performance the servos on this are 750 watt maybe a little overkill but they'll shove this machine around at over 400 inches a minute i say over because 400 is all i had the courage to try any faster and i bet they could flip this mill over jackie chan style to make that a little more relatable 400 inches a minute is six and a half football fields per hour for our metric friends that's 5.7 football fields per hour now i'm not running it nowhere near that fast less than half actually i think i'm at 180 inches per minute there are two reasons i settled on that speed the sadder of the two and i really should have seen this coming for us for the trees sort of thing is the spindle oem this thing is meant to do about 2500 rpm it's a bit of a traditional milling machine head not really intended for the high speeds that cnc are doing today so with a 2500 rpm spindle this machine is not doing any of those fancy new high speed machining dance moves going to be slow and steady for the maho unless i do a spindle upgrade or a second high speed spindle maybe i can hang off the side or swing the head over and swing it in this is a universal mill it has a horizontal spindle hidden back there and this vertical head swings out of the way but that brings us to point number b this is a dovetail machine it has cast iron ways no fancy schmancy linear rails even if i had a higher spindle speed to match the four or 500 inches a minute the servos could do i wouldn't want to drive these ways that fast especially on those like helical cuts where the machine is doing the little jitterbug in one spot for an extended period of time the waves run on a film of oil and that rapid back and forth probably isn't very healthy for them if you're wondering what rapid back and forth looks like it's something like that for what i'm doing though or for what i think i'm doing larger end mills and steel mostly i think this should be okay only time will tell i suppose or someone smarter than me if anyone out there already knows what a dovetail machine of similar weight can endure let me know i guess i could probably look it up perhaps too i hesitate to share this but let's take a cursory look at the health of this mill pretty nice huh that was the x-axis for anyone playing along at home let's try the y-axis [Music] that my friends is a one thou drop or it looks like a one thou drop when you start throwing indicators on machine tools you have to be very careful you don't misread the tea leaves or the indicator for that matter be careful not to make rash decisions allow me to explain indulge me if you will and imagine this large parallel is say the knee of the mill or the bed of your lathe or whatever part of the machine tool the other part's right on and this other parallel might be in this example like the table that's moving back and forth or the carriage on your lathe so we have the table installed on the knee and it can zip back and forth and let you mill your happy little parts let's drop the indicator on it and see how this machine is doing indicator zeroed out and i'll just translate the table pretty good huh no indicator movement excellent but what does that mean exactly is the table moving perpendicular to the machine before you answer that let's try one more here's another parallel what i'll do now is install this under the quote-unquote knee your bed hopefully you can see that's obviously crooked we'll zero that indicator out on the table what do you think's going to happen no indicator movement [Music] i assume most of my viewers like me were fortunate enough to make it through middle school and i'm 86 sure this setup is crooked why isn't that indicator telling me that that needle should be going ape poop okay so maybe that was a bit facetious i apologize point is you have to be mindful of what your indicator reading actually means here hopefully it might be obvious but if your machine's ways were worn convex maybe which in the machines you and i talk about is not uncommon the indicator wouldn't tell you the whole story or just to the indicator rather imagine the gib was looser missing in the table so the table could lift at the end of travel because of the weight you're hanging out one side keep in mind we're talking subtle stuff of course if you wind your mill table all the way to one side and it falls on your foot the machine is probably clapped out but if it's subtle and it dips on both ends your fancy pants highfalutin indicator would tell you your table had a low spot right in the middle settle down old tony it's okay you're just getting off track short story long i went at this with parallels and reference squares and i think i'm okay i mean i think the machine is okay i've come to the conclusion that i need to break this table down and remount it you see this horizontal table we've been measuring off of is just an accessory to the machine the real machine table is vertical that's this right here i should be measuring up against this the horizontal table just bolts right on to here i might have a chip or dirt or something between these two at the top that's kicked to the top surface down a thou or maybe i don't i mean what do i know i'll have to check this apron or this vertical table first and work my way back out to find that thou or more than likely just forget about it and enjoy my life what i do know though is the head is seriously out of tram by a lot too the spindle axis isn't perfectly perpendicular to the table because the head is rotated slightly to one side some eagle-eyed viewers noticed that in the last video where i got the poor fly cutter results this thing was trammed in but i either didn't tighten the head down enough and it rotated here or i'm being too heavy-handed with my new toy i'll sort that out now before i do any more cutting while we're up here i added some controls to the front of the machine 3d printers been coming in real handy i may change this up as i get more used to things but for now i've got three buttons on the side back there top two the white ones are for the power draw bar the middle button releases the tool and the top one draws the next tool in those two buttons are wired right to the hydraulics and don't go through the control system really the blue button is for the machine oiler the oiler fires a shot on each startup every time i power up the machine but if i'm doing something particularly long i can force it to oil from there eventually i might wire that to some sort of timer where it oils the machine every hour or something or to get really fancy every x number of inches the machine has traveled since last oiling just so i never have to worry about it except for checking there's actually oil in the oiler that is this here is an e-stop despite its prominent location i still have trouble finding it when things go south in my shorts my instinct is still to try to stop the machine at the touch screen this on the other hand is a momentary switch it can go one of two directions i can go between feed hold and cycle start right here at the machine super handy to have i'll likely reprint this housing and add a feed rate override up here too this could have been two buttons i just happen to have this momentary switch but it's really nice to be able to stop and start your g-code just while you're standing over top of it certainly you can do that from the touch screen too but this is just a lot more convenient and let's not forget my freak genetic experiment gone wrong of an mpg this is three hand wheels x y and z in a 3d printed enclosure it just got a little hook to match the lip on the mill table and a big magnet embedded in there to help keep it in place technically this atrocity is really no different than your mama's cnc pendant just with 200 percent more mpg this thing works just fine mind you well sort of it's seeing better days and my concrete floor a bunch but you guessed it it only has one encoder wheel and you have to select which axis that wheel is controlling since it's 20 21 and no one has time for that i'm using three encoders one for each axis i'm even contemplating a fourth that crazy talk maybe let's just say i'm lucky this isn't a five axis mill i really like having all of these simultaneously available i not on the x and a available on the y instead of having to look away maybe a dozen times to set a single mpg to another axis and back again anyway lots of people have asked how i wired three simultaneous mpgs into the machine and to answer that we'll have to do something i've been dreading since this video started we'll have to have a look inside the electrical cabinet actually before we go around back i've also wired in one of these cheap ebay tool setters nice addition so far seems pretty reliable and repeatable good enough for what this machine is going to do this is just a switch wired into the control system that the machine can use to measure tool lengths not to insult your intelligence but if i'm running a program with one tool of a certain length and i switch to another tool of a more different length well you somehow have to tell the machine that usually what i do is the old paper trick that's what i did on the router anyway still do that on my other mill now you kind of slip it under there until the just get some drag under the paper and zero your tool out this does the same exact thing and uses much less paper i can hit the little tool change button in mock the machine will come down on top of this tool setter until it trips that switch and now the maho knows where this tool is in space and time i'm just starting to set up tool libraries i don't have that many tools the ones that remain a fixed length something like this it's got a tool number it's in the library i just swap tools the machine already knows how long this is because it's already been through the tool setter but tools that change day to day or program to program like a drill chuck with whatever drill bit might be in there i load the tool cycle it over the tool setter and i'm off to the races this actually has two stages there's two switches in here one for the tool setter and if something were to go wrong and it goes too far it's got an e-stop down at the bottom the first switch is wired to the probe input on one of the drives and the second switch just ties into my e-stop loop this little periscope thing in the back is a compressed air jet i don't have it plumbed in or even tightened down for that matter but you could wire an air solenoid to this have it shoot a jet of air across the top of the tool setter to clean it off before you do a probing cycle this was 40 maybe 50 bucks from ebay not sure how long it'll last but so far so good i hope everyone's sitting down for this and before i open this up i just want you to know that i started out with the best of intentions i routed my wires labeled some of them used proper wire terminals and ferrules and that sort of thing everything was going great then i ran out of space and it's since turned into a free-for-all looks to the contrary there is really not that much going on in here and believe it or not i still remember where everything goes i'm just going to have to write it all down and make a wiring diagram to stick inside the door before it's too late the original maho cabinet was bigger than the mill and well now i know why i thought i'd laid this out with breathing room but somewhere along the line i forgot to carry a one or something i don't know stuff like terminal blocks and power supplies just robbed me of a lot more space than i was expecting the board running the mpg is this one here this is a pokeys board built for and sold by element cnc to the best of my knowledge it's a general sort of programmable i o board meant for interfacing control panels i think you can connect almost anything through here but i have the three mpgs wired to that and that's about it it's getting 12 volts too from somewhere and it's connected via ethernet it's not on the ethercat system it's just regular ethernet right to the pc this board comes up as a configurable plug-in in mach4 in my case speaking of ethercat let's talk about the elephant in the room the drives motors and control system the whole control system is really only a quarter or a third of this cabinet this ethercat stuff is nuts there's no control board there's no breakout board none of that nonsense it's just ethernet cable daisy chained one drive to the next and they run on line voltage so there's no power supply for the drives and the motors in the control cabinet per se the dc power supplies are just for relays inputs outputs that sort of thing the other big components you see vfd for the spindle control this isn't on the ethercat system i'm running this with modbus right from the pc this particular toshiba drive uses what looks like a cat5 ethernet cable but the other end of this is one of those serial to usb converters and it's just plugged into the usb port in the back of the computer this is the hydraulic unit for the power draw bar and that's the oiler at the bottom so really it's just the drive for x the drive for z and the drive for y the drives are relatively straightforward again there's an ethernet cable that comes in the top to tie it into the ethercat system down here there's all the motor connections power and then the four wires to the servo this thing is the connection from the encoder and then it's got a db44 i think i o port looks like a big parallel port connector you do get the connector with the drive but it's not wired you have to do your own wiring you just take a close look at the pin out and it has little solder cups you can just insert wires and solder them in place i dropped some heat shrink on each one and hopefully i'll put up the diagram it's got digital inputs digital outputs differential and probing inputs these connections are what are watching things like the e-stop turning on and off the coolant pump air blast the tool setter that we saw and each drive has one so with three drives have 3x those number of inputs and outputs you can think of this connector as your breakout board slash i o board that you would have in a traditional hobbyist cnc setup i'm running lead shine ac servos and lead shine ac drives i'll throw the part numbers on screen for you other than the fact that these are servos there's nothing particularly special about these specific drives and motors except for one thing the cost these servos are cutting edge tech well let me qualify that servos for motion control have been around a long time but this level of sophistication and control is only just starting to come into the hobby market these used to be relegated to higher end industrial applications very expensive machines fancy robots that sort of thing prices for this stuff has been coming down fast and is now in the reach of bums like us no offense of course if this one looks a little bit bigger it's because it is i mean technically it's still the same 750 watt servo but it's got an electronic brake on the back otherwise it's exactly the same as the other three that we saw in the machine again wiring is really easy it's got the servo wires coming into the bottom an encoder connection that just plugs into the front this connection is what gives the drive position feedback from the servo and there's that dbe 44 i think it was it's got a usb port so you can configure the thing but you can also do it from the little menu up at the top here it's a little cryptic it's like trying to program an inverter a vfd not too bad once you get used to it but it's intimidating through the software interface it's more plain english a bit easier to set up but let's talk about pricing not because i want to but because i think you'll ask pricing for this stuff gets a little tricky to talk about because it depends so much on the system you choose to build there are a lot of ways to implement ethercat control a system like this like i have on the mill used to cost 10 grand i have no idea if that's true i'm just making that up but i'm sure at some point it costs 10 grand as of today a complete kit is in the two to three thousand dollar range depending on how you deck it out what size motors you get etc you can get the same exact system for about thirty two hundred bucks from automation technologies no relation no affiliation check it out yourself if you're interested that might sound expensive but keep in mind that's a 750 watt system that comes with a computer monitor mach 4 and kingstar license you can even get it cheaper if you don't get the kit with the computer but there's a catch there the pc that comes with the automation tech kit is a refurbished dell not a bad machine i imagine will probably run the system just fine but to the best of my knowledge is not supported by kingstar if something doesn't work in your system your only recourse will be automation technologies pc i'm using on my system is an industrial pc from element cnc and is built to kingstar's spec this will set you back a little more depending how you get it but expect to pay good computer price for it so i said king star four times now i should probably explain what it is you know on how your classic stepper system you need a control board my router for example runs a smooth stepper from warp 9. the cnc etch-a-sketch we built used a pmdx board control boards are what turn the software instructions that come out of mach 4 or whatever cnc software you use into signals for the drives and the motors think of king star as the software version of those it zombie mind controls some of the cpu from windows and pushes real-time directions to the hardware if you're thinking what i thought when i first ran into kingstar that a software abstraction layer running on top of windows was probably a recipe for disaster well keep in mind industrial robots that build cars and run some of the big name industrial machining centers do it with king star behind the scenes pulling the strings i'm only just getting familiar with it but from what i've seen so far i'm impressed so here's where it can get tricky from what i understand king star will only license their software to you and support it if you run it on very specific hardware i mean you could just imagine what it's doing to the poor brains inside the pc to make it dance if you try to run it on a machine that doesn't have king star's blessing well you're on your own so i'll be honest i don't know how much of this you could chalk up to a kid with new toy syndrome but these servos have been incredible no more electronic dance music the steppers used to make they're super strong super fast and having coders this machine requires no home switches no homing on startup it always knows where i left it always knows where my fixture offsets are it's amazing really granted it's not true positional closed loop there are no scales feeding actual position of the machine back to the system but the system knows where the screws are and the screws are tied to the machine and for now that's perfect i've been pushing it pretty hard crashed more than a few tools it's never lost its spot in the event of a hard crash the servos can trip out they have tripped out tool will break but every time i've dried my tears and picked up again my references were still spot on on a stepper system you'd have to re-zero the whole works now again granted there are fancier steppers out there these days with encoder feedback so the lines are getting blurry but between what i was running on the router and what i'm running here just no contest though tuning has been a little tricky servos need to be tuned did i mention that yet mock and element tech support have been great shout out to brian and tom over there but in their defense there's only so much they could do over email you can't tune a servo if you're not in the same room with it let's take a moment and see if we can't do a grave disservice to servo tuning and maybe what this closed loop stuff is doing for us to prep for this next part i had to watch quite a few youtube videos my main takeaway is i now need a prop stepper motor to have this discussion i was just going to demonstrate this with my cordless drill since in a way it's both open end closed loop at the same time technically it's not closed loop but when you throw in your brain telling your finger to keep squeezing because the screw isn't stripped just yet it's pretty close to closed loop control this will be quick and we'll get to tuning closed loop versus open loop so a loop in this case means the information going between components for now we're just talking motor and controller but the loop could be much bigger than that like if you had more stuff talking or not talking to each other for the stepper we have well the stepper and a stepper driver this is generic stepper motor stuff just from ebay nothing fancy the analog to this in servo land is the servo and its drive so the stepper this stepper in this case is open loop and the servo is closed the stepper is open loop because well there's no loop at all it's just a straight line the computer tells what the drive to do and the drive tells what the stepper to do the end in fact they should call it closed loop and no loop at all the pc in my case mach 4 or mach3 or whatever you're using tells the drive how far it wants the motor to go how fast and which direction the drive translates that into secret stepper language talk and passes on the message the stepper then just goes and does what it's told that's it really but what if the stepper can't do what it's told you know for reasons outside of its control say it runs into the end of its travel it's moving along whatever and hits a brick wall or you've asked it to make a move it doesn't have the power to make say i asked the stepper motor to pick up my car the computer will tell the drive to do it the drive will tell the stepper and the stepper will try its little heart out but we both know it's not picking up my car it'll just sit there buzz get hot but nothing will move if you're using the stepper to run a mill or a lathe you may be taking cut that requires more power than the stepper could provide imagine it stalls say you told it to move an inch through adamantium it might only make it 0.99 inches the stepper has lost some steps but as far as the control system is concerned everything is great it passed the buck and it no longer cares what the stepper did all is good in the world but your stepper didn't really do what you wanted it to do in comes the servo or a closed loop stepper motor i told you it gets fuzzy the servo can provide feedback it's got an encoder it can talk back to the drive if the drive tells it to turn three times and for whatever reason it only turns two well now the drive knows and can keep pushing harder or give up and stop but even if it stops it knows it only did two turns it knows where the motor is between the motor and the drive we have a closed loop at these particular servos or heck maybe all servos i don't know has a rechargeable battery in the encoder line here i don't know why i'm opening this but i'm not opening this there's a battery in here even if the drives are powered down all the lights are off and no one is home and the ghost that haunts your garage comes by and turns the motor shaft oh this is the one with the brake the really strong ghost that haunts your garage comes by and turns the motor shaft the drive will know the darn thing is keeping track and that's why i can run my mill without homing or limit switches once i tell the software how big the yard is that it can play in it won't let the motors go outside those bounds capisce okay now that i've completely butchered that topic and seeing that i'm still covered in blood let's do the same for tuning holy smokes by the time i'm through this this video is going to be 48 minutes long what on earth is tuning and why do we need it in a way you can sort of think of everything we set up until now is like where your motor moves to or why it's moved to where it went now we're sort of getting into how your servo does what the computer has asked it to do for clarity's sake instead of revolutions let's talk about linear movement in my case the servo is attached to a screw that's moving some part of a milling machine so one turn of the motor is equivalent to some amount of movement of the mill when we tell a servo to move say 10 inches we're telling it to go from point a to point b usually with some certain speed if we're milling that might be the feed rate if we just want to snap a tool in half that might be the rapid rate you know for a good measure anyway we hit go and the servo ramps up and takes off takes this whole thing with it now hopefully it's obvious if you've ever driven a car or i don't know god forbid ran anywhere you can't just move to a new spot and stop instantaneously you might either start slowing down as you approach your target then stop or you might overshoot and have to step back a bit remember these things have feedback so they know where they are if they overshoot they'll move backwards if you get too conservative they'll start to slow down earlier than you might like and try to creep up on their target they're going to get to where you ask them to go but remember now we're talking about how they get there that's where tuning comes in you have to tune your servo to behave the way you want it to for your particular application so why don't they do that at the factory i hear you ask well we kind of answered that but they do and they don't they come with a factory tune for a lack of a better way to put it the manufacturer can take some good guesses after all you bought a servo of a certain power rating and the smarts in the box have some wiggle room that might work fine for you right out of the gate but again they don't know what you plan to do with it if you're just moving shampoo bottles from one conveyor belt to the other it might not matter if they overshoot just a little bit granted that's maybe not the best example in the world but that's all i got for now you know what i did with my servo motor i bolted it to a 400 pound chunk of cast iron man i really hope everyone guessed that since that's what we've been talking about this entire time when that servo is told to shove this table 10 inches at 20 miles per hour it's got a heck of a lot of weight to stop when it gets there if we're working on precision parts we certainly don't want it to cut an extra inch before it realizes it's gone too far and comes back an inch that'd just be a mess now wouldn't it and it gets even hairier throw in two more servos each of them pushing around very different amount of weight and asks them to work together say we want the machine to cut a circle after all who doesn't want to cut a circle we need all three of them to be a very specific points at very specific times or we won't get a circle you ever try to draw a circle on an etch a sketch if your tuning isn't right you'll get some funny circles and not haha funny i've done a lot of testing a lot more than you see here this is just what i happen to be able to dig up i'd change the tuning a bit and try again this was one of my first tests you see all those little facets those are the servos trying to respond to coordinated commands with their tuning not quite right one or both of the servos were under overcompensating this particular part also shows some other issues with the machine above and beyond tuning i won't get into specifics here but let's just say it's also very important how or how well your servo is attached to your equipment if a belt is loose or stretching for example it's going to drive the servo bonkers trying to predict where and how it'll end up there ditto for a bad ball nut or a squishy coupler anything other than a very rigid connection between the servo and the thing you're driving is going to wreak havoc with the control system so tuning where do you get it how much does it cost what does it taste like i'll give you a quick overview but first let me just say you shouldn't let it intimidate you it's one of those things that are easy and hard at the same time it's sort of like leveling a lathe if you've ever tried to do that depends how deep you want to get into it and when you're at sort of good enough most if not all servo systems will come with software and i think an auto tuning feature once my components were installed i plugged in a usb cable and fired up the lead shine software that came with them there's literally a button for auto tuning you push it that moves the table or whatever back and forth a few times at different speeds and it'll come up with what it thinks is the best tune for your system depending what condition your machine is in you may be done right there and that's the first thing i did for each of my servos practically speaking we're talking about four maybe five parameters in the system for each drive again if you've programmed a vfd it's very similar in the vfd you push the button a bunch of times until you get to the configuration menu and then maybe you might be putting in stuff like horsepower of the motor that it's running it's rated speed poles voltage i don't even remember but it's the same sort of thing you can do it from here it's easier to do it in the software certainly if you want to get all phd thesis on the thing the software does provide stuff like position velocity current torque error information all in graphical forms if you know what you're looking for and want to get all mathy you can do that in the software i did spend a lot of time with those at first it gave me a sense of which parameters had the most effect and i'll probably plug the drives in again once i'm happy mechanically with the mill just to get a sense of how a particular tune is performing even though my real test would be actually cutting circles and swoopy shapes this one actually turned out pretty good compared to this one aluminum verse steel just because the forces involved are less and those forces obviously have an impact on how the ball nut is performing still a little bit of fastening not as bad as this one moral of story if you're willing to put in the time it's not that hard but it can become a rabbit hole if you keep thinking you could just get a little bit better from what i'm learning quite frankly the window of tuning is relatively large and i'd be willing to bet odds are there's something else in your system not quite right i mean first time around i tuned it and then realized i didn't have the oiler running so i was trying to tune a dry milling machine not dry dry i'm bad but not an idiot most days anyway but the oiler makes quite a difference in the performance of the whole system all right welcome to the second half of the show before we go on let me just take a moment to say hi to the new viewers who skipped ahead to the end and are just joining us now this isn't quite the end though i figure since i'm long past that magic 8 to 10 minute mark well why stop now since i mentioned the euler a few times thought i'd mention the roller coaster ride this turned into this is a willy vogel fun name for a serious oiler this has a reservoir and a pump control system in there all built into a cute little package you can still get these but they are expensive had this one not come with the mill i would have probably gotten a cheaper manual pump version but i'm glad this is here i put 2 whey oil in this thing that's the oil i use for all my machines i want to give a quick but heartfelt shout out to rotary smp not to be confused with linear smp the distinguished mr rotary has a youtube channel and has also tackled a maho cnc project his particular maho was already cnc already had ball screws and motors i think he did more of a lobotomy than a conversion per se not to say that's easy but he's now got his running linuxcnc great work over there definitely check him out oh and for those of you asking about a mini lathe cnc conversion he's done that too all the more reason to go give him some love link down below anyway when i was gutting this out of the original cabinet i noticed it said 110 volts right on the nameplate in fact it still does easy enough right so i just dug the thing out with a crowbar fast forward a few months to me actually breaking it down and cleaning it up when i notice a wiring diagram inside the cover i can't show that one to you unfortunately it's sort of trapped in there now but here's a dramatic reenactment the wiring diagram threw me for a loop cast into doubt everything i thought i knew first it was in german that's never a good sign and second it was tapping r s and t three phase lines was this thing a 110 volt three phase unit does a 110 volt 3 phase even exist was it a prehistoric german thing i had so many questions and was afraid i'd burn this thing up so i turned to the internet willie vogel pumps are now sold and or supported by skf the bearings people i sent tech support and email they weren't fast but to their credit they did eventually get back to me kudos to skf but rotary smp beat them to it at about the same time he sent me a message saying he'd be glad to help if i needed anything and help he did turns out there was one very important detail i missed on the wiring diagram it showed three wires but only two connections crazy germans anyway i wired it up with a bit more confidence the rest is history the illustrious mr rotary was also kind enough to tell me that mahou green is a din standardized machine tool color in germany ralph 6011 so i got the perfect color match some of you may also remember during the tear down i cut all of my oil lines snipped them clean into and tore them all out they looked terrible and i thought it was easy enough to just get some new line and change them out if you're going to do something might as well do it right right as it turns out finding the right ferrules and compression fittings wasn't that easy on top of which the original tubing turned out to be perfect just dirty there was absolutely no reason to cut them oil systems on machine tools can be a little tricky they aren't just about running the lines to where you need oil the oil in these systems is metered meaning on each line there are check valves and specialty sized jets for lack of a better word nozzles technically called metering units i think that deliver just the right amount of oil to that particular branch to that particular line think of it like this if it were just a bunch of tubes running all over the place and the pump inside fired a shot of oil it would all go to the point of least resistance like if one line is just dripping onto one of the screws and another line is feeding the dovetails of the table with all the weight on it all the oil would just run out the screw line there might not be any pressure to oil the dovetails the system needs to be balanced so everything is getting the right amount of oil and nothing gets starved i reused all the original elbows manifolds check valves and meters and i repurposed some unused lines to feed the ball nuts and capped off some ports i no longer needed i'd really hoped to get to some of the cool software mods and features i'm working through in mach4 the software side of things i mentioned previously that i'm going for a manumatic cnc machine hybrid manual and cnc but that'll have to wait for another video it's some pretty fun stuff i think you'll love it and i do plan to share it once it's all up and running i'll try to figure out some way to get the software out to everybody that's interested it'll only work for mock but if you like what you see and you know what you're doing feel free to port it over to your preferred cnc software it's not so much new groundbreaking stuff but more of workflow and using existing tools and wizards in a different way much more user-friendly way at least i think so anyway my end game is to maybe do 90 percent of the parts you know the kind of parts i tend to work on without ever going into fusion or cad cam but i've said too much next up on the chopping block for the maho conversion i plan to add a webcam to the milling machine for the real fans if you know what i mean i've seen some people do edge finding and measuring with a machine mounted webcam and mock has this really cool teach function where you can walk the machine through what you want it to do like manually it learns that then it takes over and does a simon says routine i've never tried it should be pretty cool but it'll make more sense when you see it if i get it to work and of course a fourth axis that's what this is for i don't know if i'll get that build on video since we already did something very similar already but either way expect fourth axis milling soon that was a lot and fun fact i did this whole video on one continuous breath for the three of you that stuck through that whole marathon my hat is off to you were i wearing one hope that answered more questions than it raised and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 970,124

Rating: 4.9636178 out of 5

Keywords: AC servo, leadshine, ethercat, kingstar, milling machine, cnc conversion, diy cnc, mach3, mach4, servo tuning, closed loop, open loop, loop de loop, maho, maho 400

Id: tiVWBOBUlaA

Length: 48min 1sec (2881 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/roofiethedog]

48 minutes.

[u/Vishaldoit]

epic saga continues.