What CNC Machine is this?

[winzhangout]

I was looking at an CNC machine in Sweden that I maybe buy. The problem is that the owner died in Covid so the wife don’t know anything about the machine more then it was bought from England.

The stepping motors has CNC4YOU on it the Z axis is Nema 34 8.7Nm and the rest is 23 3.1Nm. But i cant find the machine on that site, and there Z axis not look like this machine.

Im little worried that I cant get parts to it the rack and pinion rassle little so maybe I need to buy new. Any clues how built this machine?
Should be good to also have support for files and that thing.


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[JohnHaine]

Maybe a home-brew using their components?

[Doddy]

That Z-Axis has a whiff of Marchant Dice about it. The rest - plenty of witness-marks from obvious hand-finished components/assembly.

[AndyGuid]

Agree with both your points Doddy.

[cropwell]

Super Box and Tonman (BoB and Drivers now obsolete!) stink of Marchant Dice.

[winzhangout]

Super Box and Tonman (BoB and Drivers now obsolete!) stink of Marchant Dice.

I bought the machine today :-) I payed 4000Euro for it with lots of extra stuff to it.

Is the drivers so obsolete? Is it possible to upgrade the machine with new things for it like drivers and stuff like that? It run Mach3 on windows XP, should be great if its compatible with UC100 and UCCNC but probably not? :-)

For me it feels like a big upgrade from my old machine Raw CNC 1.5 extended build in Sweden. This Marchant Dice is HUGE.

I really need to find where to get this 10mm racks and pinions for it so i have extra, any suggestion where to look for it? I cant find any info where Kevin went so its hard to find where to find parts for it.

Best Regards!
Kim

[cropwell]

Rack and pinion will be Chinese. Have a look on AliExpress. If you open up the controller box and find that the BoB and drivers are connected by IDC ribbon cables and the Bob and drivers are made by Tonman they are obsolete. If you have any driver problems send me a picture of the driver showing any model number and I will look in my keep boxes. I have three of them somewhere if they are the drivers I suspect they are. If you need them, you can have them for the postage costs. Otherwise you would have to go the route I went when the BoB fried and replace the lot with standard kit. If you are running 48v then you would probably be better off going to a higher voltage at the same time.

[Clive S]

I bought the machine today :-) I payed 4000Euro for it with lots of extra stuff to it.

I really need to find where to get this 10mm racks and pinions for it so i have extra, any suggestion where to look for it? I cant find any info where Kevin went so its hard to find where to find parts for it.

Best Regards!
Kim

I would get the machine moving first then you can see if you need to change them, you don't need to fit the same racks and pinions.

The Z axis could do with some work on it and fitting a 2.2Kw W.C.. spindle and VFD

[hanermo2]

Everything You have is usable.
Everything You have could also be better.

Rack/p is easy and cheap.
Steppers and drivers are easy and cheap.

Find what you want to do.
And how much you want to do it.

I went "all-in" high end over 15 years ago and have probably spent over 150k€ on it - but I was also later paid well as the haas country sales manager, where I grew the sales 13x in 2012.

If You have a PC and a license and a working set of machx SW, most of your difficulties are less.
Vastly less.
Not because of anything about You or the tech, just that learning will be 100x less difficult and slow.

Try.
Work.
Build.
-- Learn.


There is no right or wrong.
The 70k€ HAAS industrial control is not vastly better than machx -- and the cheap chinese offline controllers for 300€ will be fine for 95% of users, esp. routers.
The 500k€ and up HERMLE is not vastly better in the control than HAAS, or machx.

Some new japanese sw controllers might be really better -- but You wont find them.
Some new sw controllers -- likewise.
I am testing and considering them.
But they run on their own 1500 € proprietary hw. Says 600€, but it´s really 1500 by the time it´s done.
Another, centronics, might be good, but its also about 2500 € like everyone else.

[winzhangout]

Please help, whats wrong this is in air without spindle connected and run in 5m/min could not be this bad trying to create circle. This is like worst shit i have seen really only hope its only something wrong in the setup not smooth at all and slow as shit. Please check the video recorded when its goes around. From 1min/m its the same slow and up and slower feedrate its slower but not smoother.
This cant be as bad as this. Nema 34 motors.

https://youtu.be/VTGPy6uqdxc

[Doddy]

Please help, whats wrong this is in air without spindle connected and run in 5m/min could not be this bad trying to create circle. This is like worst shit i have seen really only hope its only something wrong in the setup not smooth at all and slow as shit. Please check the video recorded when its goes around. From 1min/m its the same slow and up and slower feedrate its slower but not smoother.
This cant be as bad as this. Nema 34 motors.

https://youtu.be/VTGPy6uqdxc

My gut feeling is that this is the post-processor / motion-controller's behaviour. I'll see your YouTube and raise you a YouTube,,,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT2Jq76NChM

Try setting CV mode in Mach3 and see if that improves things. If your design/post-processor is creating a large number of arcs then you're going to force the machine to accelerate, traverse and decelerate through each arc in exact-stop mode.

I'll be the first to lambast MD, but this isn't the machine.

**EDIT**

To improve the performance you'll need to examine/tinker with the axis acceleration settings. If you hit a limit here then you might need to examine the power-supply voltage to the steppers. This will have been (negatively) impacted by the choice of Nema34s if not adequately provisioned in the PSU. Other, more clever and experienced, folk here can advise.

[winzhangout]

Machine seems little better with exact stop and cv off.

But this new video https://youtu.be/CZ6yLoRosOM

The machine vibrate when jog slow and the stepper motors sounds weird, same when run gcode the machine like microstop and vibrate because of that i think. The motors sounds not the same when jog and run gcode. When run jog mode faster or full speed it sounds good. The z axis sounds good even slow but thats not rack and pinion. It will be impossible to mill something when it vibrate like it do and microstop and not run smooth at all.

I have auto set step in mach3 to correct mm but please if anyone know if i have som setup wrong i dont actually knows what like step pulse, dir pulse and if velocity and accelerations should be set to. Same in general config. The owner of the machine is not alive and Marchand Dice is gone so i dont have anyone to ask what to set everything to. IJ Mode seems to change to Inc from absolute when restart mach3, dont know why but that i can live with.

Some pictures of settings.

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I really want this machine to work until i can rebuild it and about that what rate will this controller have, any good? http://shop.cncdrive.com/index.php?productID=1098
And stepper motor 12nm or 8nm? http://shop.cncdrive.com/index.php?productID=770 or http://shop.cncdrive.com/index.php?productID=745

[Doddy]

For those three pictures on the axis settings - I'd be setting the pulse-width to 5us in the first instance. The reason? - okay, I don't know what stepper drivers you're using but many/most use opto-isolated inputs for the step/dir signals, and /cheap/ opto-isolators can have slow response-times in the order of 3-4us (actually, worst-case performance can exceed 5us on many devices). Some are faster, but typically cheaper devices are relatively slow. Changing the pulse-width to the slowest possible (5us) gives the best possible chance for the pulse signal to be recognised by the stepper driver.

[winzhangout]

Thanks for all answers but i burned the bob when try to measure volt from spindle port, all output is dead so this shitty obsolete things is going to garbage or saving the rest for someone how need it later.

I order this instead http://shop.cncdrive.com/index.php?productID=1098 and keep writing in this post http://www.mycncuk.com/threads/15333-Gantry-plates-for-avid-drive beacuse i will same time upgrade the machine, the 10mm rack inside the alu profiles is not a good idea to save, its bad aligned and get big backslash on some part and to hard fitted on some.