Twin ball screw drive on X - configuration question

[Gary]

Personally i would connect one motor to each ball screw and drive with its own driver, or use a belt and pulley to connect both ball screws and run from a larger motor.

Dont bother running two motors from one driver, this will cause you problems.

[John S]

End of the day if your building a machine then you decide which way round you want your X and Y, does it really matter??

All the CNC stuff I have worked on always had the longest travel movement on the bed as the X. So if your gantry was wider than your machine is long (don't really know why you would do this!) then maybe I would be calling my gantry X then you would be right!

Drew a part up the other day and sorted a long thin bit of spare material out it would just fit on and put it on the router with a lump sticking out.

Loaded the program and realised I had drawn it 90 degrees to how the material lay so X needed to be Y and visa versa.

Went into Mach and swapped the pins over in ports and pins, cut the job and then swapped it back.

[Smiler]

Drew a part up the other day and sorted a long thin bit of spare material out it would just fit on and put it on the router with a lump sticking out.

Loaded the program and realised I had drawn it 90 degrees to how the material lay so X needed to be Y and visa versa.

Went into Mach and swapped the pins over in ports and pins, cut the job and then swapped it back.

Any chance of a photo of some of your machines John, you seem to do such a wide range of work with them. Are thay all self made?

Jeff.

[John S]

Yes can do some pic's tomorrow.
Good thing is I have plenty of machines, bad thing is most are not working for some reason or other but it's all part of a plan :naughty:

I have two sides to my business, one is repair engineering where I repair anything broken in industry and some new parts.

The fill in work is converting and repairing small CNC machines hence the dead ones.

Currently I have a big Beaver CNC mill, about 3 tonnes of it that runs on an old DOS system called Ahha. That is my bread and butter machine.
I also have a Tecno Isel router with home brewed electronics, runs on mach3 and does the smaller parts like brush gear for DC motors and plastic parts.

Next is a Seig X3 mill converted to CNC, this was the prototype that was offered as a kit by ArcEuroTrade who I work closely with as well as Sieg in China. This is running but minus it's computer at the moment.
it's now a test rig to develop other X3 related add ons [ more perhaps later ]

Last machine actually running is a Sieg KC4 lathe which hasn't been released yet. Again this is a test bed for Sieg and at the moment there is a threading glitch in Mach3 that stops this being signed off.



That is the sum total of working machines.

In storage is a Denford Orac lathe, a Connect CNC lathe and a Connect Mill, these are for upgrades to modern controllers.

Somewhere kicking about is a Taig mill converted to CNC but lacking it's controller box.

Last machine is a Bridgeport MDI part way thru a brain transplant to have the second Ahha unit I have spare, these are very dated being DOS but they work very well and are very reliable.
The idea of having this on Ahha is twofold, one is I have already paid for it and it wasn't cheap and secondly it means both full size machines can use the same files so it will be easier to swap jobs about.

.