Some progress tonight, whilst I had some "workshop time".

I decided to do a complete re-wire of the VFD a. to give me some more space with the machine and b. to ensure that the old stuff was not at fault. I also replaced the RCD in the workshop and now rely on the RCD at the consumer unit which feeds the barn/workshop where its split off from the main house supply.

The VFD fired up first time and still had my old settings in it, which was nice. So I then ran a quick 2D job on some 6082 aluminium, which was very light work i.e. one central 3mm drill mark at 0.1mm deep and then 4 surrounding 6mm "dowel hole" marks at 2mm deep using ramping. Used a 3mm 2flute carbide bit at 16800rpm and 800mm/min. The job itself ran a treat apart from 3 spurious e-stops (tried a debounce setting in MACH3 of 1000 and 3000, but still had a phantom e-stop). I'll have to check earthing continuity on all the CY going back to the control box, as I know my spindle is earthed back to the VFD and the CY carrying the spindle cables is also earthed at the VFD end only i.e. no loop.

Interestingly I checked continuity/resistance from the spindle to various parts of my machine and I'm getting negligible readings from the spindle, through the gantry and all the way to the main frame.

Still some progress and light possibly at the end of the tunnel - at least the job I did complete showed very little grumbling from the tool and ripped through what it did have to do, with nice chips, which gives me some hope that I can start doing something other than work on the machine and make the machine do some work for a change ;-)

More as I get time....


Chris