Last night I measured the little high speed spindle motor with a tachometer at 12 and at 24 volts:
12v =4500rpm 24v =9000rpm If I rectify 110AC I believe I would get about 130 volts DC and from the above numbers that would mean I should expect about 49500 rpm Which is suspicously close to what the manufacurer advertises for the newer machines. So it looks like I will make a supply using a small isolation transformer. Thanks to John Kasunich for his tips... My next problem is that I have discovered that the steppers on this machine are 5 phase. Granted, These are very precise German made stepper motors but I don't think I will be able to find a low cost controller to drive them. Unless somebody out there knows of an economical solution that I have overlooked. It's not beyond my capability to program a pic and design a circuit to drive them but this would entail more time than I am presently willing to commit to this conversion. This being the case, I guess I will have to swap the motors for something more common. It's a shame really, these motors have .72/.36 degree resolution indicated on them and I've read elsewhere that 5 phase steppers run very smooth. I am going to try to preserve everything when I convert the motors so that I can put the originals back in in the future, should I find a suitable controller. Since this was a pcb router, the gantry sets very low to the table on this machine. After looking things over I've determined that I can safely raise the gantry using a pair of 1-1 1/2 inch thick spacing blocks. This should then provide me with an acceptable amount of z travel. The final step is to design the z axis. This should'nt be too difficult, given that I will only have about 2 inches of travel to contend with. y plan is to make the spindle motor mounting flexible so that I can quickly inter-change between the little high speed motor and a larger router motor. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
