Gate / Bridgeport Interract / Project

[SteveH]

Hi,

I came across your posts while searching the internet for data on my own cnc mill. From the pictures on this site your mill looks identical to mine - I bought it off ebay in September 2015 from a chap in Staffordshire, he had a pair to sell. My research seems to point to it being a Topwell 4BVK from a Taiwanese company, not a Gate machine. I have a copy of the advertising brochure (attached) from Sterling Machinery who used to import and sell it as a bare machine. I have also emailed the parent company to see if they still have documents for it (still waiting...).

I used a spindle motor from an old Bridgeport Ineract and 12Nm stepper drive combo's from Leadshine to build mine up then designed my own electronic cnc controller and wrote my own software from scratch to run it, I've turned out a number of parts for friends on it. Seems quite a sturdy machine for a small knee mill, backlash is 20/23um on xy but I hope to tighten that up, steppers are strong enough to snap 3/4" end mills without slowing, removing the Z axis gib to clean it up was a swine !

I will post a few pictures of it soon.

[kingcreaky]

Hi all
Its been a long while since I posted, Hope you are all well, not sure how many old friends still around, hope to make some new :D


Ive still got the big "gate" mill, Love it, use it reasonably often, In order to aid its UX ive added some manual wind handles to the X&Y which help on some operations. ( I hear you snear)

For example... I may use the handles to wind the machine to my start point, or to a center,
or, if im just doing a quick slot.... i may just do it manually using the handles..

For the interest of clarity, the machine runs two servos for the table

https://www.vevor.co.uk/ac-servo-mot...p_010200832854

same as above, just 1kw flavour.

I run a normal stepper and stepper driver on the Quill

The servo controllers are then wired via a ethernet smooth stepper to Mach3 in a pretty vanilla setup, Dean helped me with many years ago.


Anyway, in order to use the handles, up until now, ive just turned the electric to the controller and therefore servo controllers off... as when the machine is on, obviously the servos hold position and im unable to wind the handles..

Ive got two questions,

Firstly, how would i go about adding a switch, which would disable the "hold" on the servo... (So i could wind the handle on the axis)
(Id potentially like to flick the switch, wind the axis to say a start position, then flick the switch to give back control to the servo)
** this would also be useful, to be used as a lock if I was manually machining for example

The way they are wired at the moment, I believe is called half loop, in that the encoder feeds back to the controller, but not all the way back to mach3.

Im considering buying a DRO for the machine, again, for my semi manual operations, but I did wonder if there was any way of getting the servo encoders to feedback to mach3... or maybe even just ad seperate encoders?


thanks in advance for any help or thoughts on this subject.