Quote Originally Posted by blackburn mark View Post
sounds like you might be one of the experts around here with all that experience :)
it will be interesting to see how you impliment your turret if you decide to go down that road

good luck :)
Mark,

Thanks for the kind words, but I don't know if I'd consider myself an "expert"; especially on building or converting a machine tool to computer control. While I do have a fair amount of G-code and converstaional programming experience, there are still a great deal of things that I don't fully comprehend or have any experience with yet.

As for the turret, so far all my research on commercially available turrets has proved useless. It seems that nobody builds and offers a turret small enough for my needs. Even a Pragatti BP50 would be about three or four times heavier than I could use (not to mention quite complex and pricey for my budget). My best bet would be to design one myself-using a rather simple design with hardened pins to lock the tool disk in place, a stepper or servo motor to control the indexing, and possibly a pneumatic cylinder to release the tool disk from the locked or "clamped" position. But that's another worry for a later date; I need to situate the spindle drive and control first...

I believe I've settled upon the Mitsubishi FR-D700 series VFD to control the spindle motor. Even using a 1725rpm 208-230VAC 3-phase motor, I could (at least temporarily) see 11.5K rpm motor shaft speed with the drive's up to 400Hz high-speed parameter setting, eliminating the need for a 3450rpm motor or any gearing in the headstock (which would be tricky to control without manual intervention). It appears I'll have to invest in a few other products to control this drive with Mach3 and to incorporate the E-stop to both the spindle motor drive and the axis drives, but it sounds like the benefits of this VFD will be worth the additional cost of those products.

I believe I'm going to post a new thread to see if anybody on this forum has any experience with this Mitsubishi FR-D700 inverter VFD...

Again, thanks!

Sincerely,

Adam Collins