Quote Originally Posted by Zadig View Post
Pictures of the servo mountings would be useful. Looking at your pictures on Flickr, I think you have a more advanced model than my own. My own is a Matchmaker and very different to yours in quite a few aspects. Yours seems to be reminiscent of a true Shizuoka CNC unit where as my own is a Matchmaker conversion. I am not too impressed with Matchmaker's workmanship on my machine, although that is no longer an issue as most of it has gone. Luckily my quill lubrication is very visible, so I should have no problems there. Your summit toolchanger is again, radically different to mine, it looks tidier. I have considered losing the ram and replacing it with a stepper and rotary encoder as a substitute for the microswitch and cam system on the top. As you say an Arduino would be good for this type of purpose. I haven't decided whether or not to scrap the geneva mech on the carousel yet, it seems to work quite well on my unit and with a delay programmed into the Arduino code I think it may be OK. Have you had your toolchanger working yet? I had a problem with mine when I first tried to get it to work in maual. I ended up having it in pieces half a dozen time 'till I found the problem. It is quite a neat action that it does and the novelty of it working still amuses me. As for tooling, the Erickson type seems to be reasonably plentyful on Ebay although I have a lot of ISO 40 stuff and may make a new set of claws for it , who knows?
I'll try and get some pics over the weekend.
Going by what I found stripping the X-axis, I'd say mine did originally have steppers, and the servos were part of the Heindenhain retrofit, which was done by a company I can't currently remember the name of. Underneath the covers, lots of bits havn't been painted, whereas all the original bits are painted all over. Where is the lubrication for your quill?
I've never had the toolchanger working, as I had to cut the wiring to the front control panel to get the head off. The original plan had been to unbolt the head, spin it around on the mounting boss, and bolt it on at 90deg to get under the door. However that plan quickly failed, when we realised the boss wasn't machined the way we thought it was and there was no way we were going to get it spun, so had to remove it completely. Only quick solution was to cut all the wiring to the switches, as it was soldered on with no connectors.

I was hoping you'd maybe bought some new toolholders, as I'd like to get a couple ER holders to start with. From my research, DIN2080 holders should fit, but I was hoping someone could confirm!


And for clarity, if any of the mods read this, could they split all this Shizouka talk into a seperate thread?