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Post by Deleted on Oct 17, 2016 17:14:35 GMT -8
I have been looking extensively for better spindle motor options for some time now and from all the options I have checked out, some fare better than others. I see that Vectorclip3D has done a mod on a General 40-913 (same as Oliver 1013) by using a trim router for a spindle motor. While the ability to run at 30,000 rpm is nice, from what I have been finding out is the trim routers wear out especially from prolonged use which can cause them to get quite hot. Any magnet in a motor degrades at higher temperatures as well. The outer body on most trim routers is usually metal but the internals have a lot of plastic which could succumb to heat. Several people that have used this option for their CNC machines report that they go thru 3-4 of these a year. Trim routers run around $100 and up
Option #2 is one I have personally done with a 400 watt 48 volt DC brushless spindle motor. Results were decent, but the 12,000 rpm top speed is somewhat under powered in that it does not carve quite as smooth of a surface. I have only used on medium speed carving and have not tried using this one a low speed carve because it just would take too long to carve the size pieces I do. These motors with a motor controller, DC power supply and motor mount run from $150-200.
Option #3 would be a brushless spindle motor which is run from a Variable Frequency Drive or VFD and is water cooled. These motors have a rpm range of 6 - 24,000 and are rated at 2 HP. The spindle speed is controlled with VFD which feeds different frequencies to the motor to adjust speed (think of your household current which usually has a rating of 110 volts operating at 60 hertz frequency) The water cooling is accomplished by placing a pond type pump in a container with a 50/50 mix of water/antifreeze which is circulated thru a cooling jacket on the motor via hose lines to the top of the motor.(I think I would use a 5 gal. bucket with a lid on it) These spindle/VFD setups run somewhere in the $ 400 price range and do not come with a spindle mount. The mounts can be found from several sites. I believe this option is the one I will go with when the time comes that I need to replace the original motor.
I do not know what the spindle run out would be for the trim routers but even if it is an acceptable number to start with I think it would degrade quickly. The run out on options 2 and 3 above is .0005. #2 being somewhat underpowered, would lead to that number going up from wear but not as fast as the trim router. Water cooling plus higher rpm and 2 HP motor leads me to believe option 3 is the way to go.
Every option can be run separately from the machine control system, without gutting out any of the boards, like in the 40-913 mod. In their mod the video shows the machine is being run in a non-raster mode which is thru some cad program, Artcam would be my guess. I don't know how long the gear rack on the 1013 "Y" axis would hold up to that mode of operation, and that modification is another thing I would consider down the road. Adding some extra length to the "Y" axis table and converted to a lead screw drive like the other axis.
I am not yet ready to do the VFD spindle but when I do, I will post the process on here.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 18, 2016 18:16:55 GMT -8
I wonder if you could contact one of the companies that you showed catalog pictures from, and see if they'd let you ship them one of your old spindle motors and see if they can duplicate it or not and for what price?
They might be interested if they knew the potential market from General and Oliver machine owners could be 500 units or so per year.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 19, 2016 17:57:56 GMT -8
They would also need to do an analysis of the driver board for the motor that is built into the machine, since all commands for it's operation are handled by the control board. Brushless motors operate by having a rotating current pulse of + then - . There are 6 poles inside our motor and those pulses rotate in that manner from pole to pole rapidly alternating from being positive to negative which causes the magnetic center holding the spindle shaft to rotate. The driver board is what send those signals at a rapid enough pace to generate the 15,000 rpm the motor is rated at.
My main concern was to find a spindle which has more power, since ours are a bit under powered which I believe is what is causing the failures. There are times when doing a carve that the spindle goes down to a depth of 4-5 mm and you can clearly hear the extra load on the motor.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 23, 2016 5:30:22 GMT -8
Doing set up on a new piece today, and while running the border test got an error code 12 .... spindle motor overheating. Now since the spindle motor wasn't even running, that seems pretty weird. Think I'll take the cover off the spindle motor "box" and blow it clean since it's been a while since I did that. Then I'll try again.
Cleaned out the spindle motor area, there was some dust in there but nothing spectacular. Tried it again, got another code 12 but it took longer this time. The first border run the Code 12 happened about 3/4 of the way down the left Y axis border. The second time it almost made it to the point where it would return to start.
I'm cutting a 10.5 x 17.5" piece, the code is coming at about the end of running the border - just before it returns to start position. I did hear a beep-beep-beep noise while it was transversing the X axis on both ends, which went away quickly and only happened towards the end of the X axis run in each direction, it almost sounded like a normal sound the machine makes while running in manual mode, but not quite anything I remember hearing before.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 23, 2016 17:52:32 GMT -8
Message from iconic said that he never bothers with the border, so I should probably just go ahead and try carving the project. He also sent me the owners manual for the General Machine version of the 1013 which recommends lubricating the three lead screws every sixty hours or so, something I'd never heard from Oliver. Instructions show how to lube the x axis lead screw, the rack and gear on the table, and the lead scrw on the z axis. Gives me something to work on this week, I want to re-set the table also, think it may be just a tiny bit loose.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2016 5:26:53 GMT -8
Rick, I have for some time now been very lightly lubing all the rails and the lead screws with silicone lube. I just wipe them down with a rag with the silicone lube sprayed on it, I have the cover off on the X axis screw so I can get to it, Z axis I just give it a real quick squirt of spray and the gear rack only occasionally needs lubed and I use a bearing grease for that. Your table being in some sort of bind might be what caused your error codes, Not the border function itself, you got to think if it causes a code in border function that it would at some point in the carve as well.
As a note: I have never ran a project without running the border function first. There has been the instance where I set the origin in the wrong place on the piece when doing the set up which would have caused a disaster like running off the piece or running into the clamps. My advice is to run it every time just for the assurance that every thing is set up and running as planned.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2016 14:08:22 GMT -8
I also always run the border, there has been times that it saved me from a major boo boo when I thought I'd turned the picture and hadn't.
I remembered (poorly obviously) hearing when I first started with the machine that it never needed to be lubricated. So in three years I never had. Bad on me. Luckily I don't use it as much as many people do so the wear and tear is minimal. I took the x axis screw cover off and found just a slight amount of accumulation on the screw, right where I had begun hearing a change in pitch as the machine ran through the border. Cleaned that off, and I have a bottle of gear lube oil that I walked down the screw and then wiped with the cloth. Did the same with the Z screw by lowering the bit as low as it would go till it hit the table, then lubed that screw. I have a long extension for my air gun, so I cleaned the screw part real well for the Y axis, then lightly lubed the gear rack. I'm now about 3/4 of the way through a large piece (10.5 x 17.5) that has a lot of carving places, and everything seems to be working well after about 9 hours of carving. So I'm hoping I'm good.
The instruction manual says to do this after every 60 hours of running, and while I'll never do it that often I definitely need to get into the habit of it. So now my entire machine has been taken apart, cleaned, lubed, and put back together.....and I have a USB extension to protect my motherboard. Hopefully I'm good for the winter.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2016 15:55:55 GMT -8
Ok, the project came out good,,,,,,,,,,,,and bad. See the picture below, this is section one of a three panel set that will show the globe. It was 10 hours of carving on normal with a 1/50 bit. It turns out the wood was cupped a little, but that doesn't explain that the last three inches or so of the picture the frame portion of it shifted to the left. If you look at the bottom, you can see the frame seems to shift but the southern tip of South American seems to be where it belongs. In the top three inches or so there are "lines" or ridges carved in the ocean just under Greenland. So all in all I'm guessing that my table needs to be reset, it would explain why the problems are just occurring in the top and bottom 3 inches of carving. The good news is that when I carve the next panel, I'll see if the problems have been corrected and then have the option of re-cutting this first panel or just using my table saw to cut off the frames of all of the panels to size. I will have to chisel and sand some on this first one, but I think I can save it.  |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2016 9:04:19 GMT -8
It seems like it would take a whole lot of table slop to cause the edges to run off that much, so I don't know if it is mechanical or in the conversion code. When I am doing a conversion in I-picture I always check to see if anything else is running in the background on my PC that would be heavy on the Operating system. I have definitely had some problems before with the conversion being done with background tasks running. I found out by running the same image thru I-picture while some heavy processes were running and then going back and running the same image thru without the background stuff running and found that the total KB's of the files were different even though the image and dimensions were exactly the same.
Being that the length of your piece is 17 1/2" I can see that your table would be extended out to the far end with a lot of it not confined by the linear rails and a little bit of play could be magnified.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2016 10:39:20 GMT -8
Since the design work went through several changes, switching between Photoshop and Publisher, it's probably a sure thing that I had something running in the background which hasn't affected me in the past.....but I normally cut much smaller pieces than this. It's interesting to note that the southern part of South America lines up exactly (it appears) like the picture was....it didn't shift left like the frame did. This makes me believe you probably are right about it being something to do in the design phase rather than the mechanical. I also didn't have the normal white border around the edge since I am inverting the picture in iPicture itself. I wonder if inverting it in Photoshop might not also help. So I've redone all the panels, and added a border this time. Just remembered that I need to go back and add some blur also before carving.
I'm still going to redo the table and tighten things up before carving again, I haven't done that in a year or so and it would be a great time to also clean the rails and add some light lube. The fact that I had ridges carved in the top 1/4 but not the rest, and then the frame was off on the bottom 1/4 seems to indicate something might be going on there also. The challenge is what keeps us going isn't it?
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Post by Deleted on Nov 2, 2016 15:05:43 GMT -8
Update. Took the table off and cleaned everything, then tightened it up. I didn't feel any slop in it prior to taking it off, but it definitely is "stiffer" now than before. Started the carving of the same panel of the world map and while it's still cleaning up the bottom 1/2" or so, everything appears to be working perfectly. Taking your advice Bob, I did redo the gee file with everything done without programs running in the background, added a border around it, and inverted it in Photoshop rather than letting ipicture do it. Think you were right, the problem was in the design, not the machine.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2019 14:02:44 GMT -8
I am doing a big craft show in Madison, IN. at the end of September. If I have a decent result for the weekend then I am going to order Variable frequency drive spindle motor and the VFD to run it. The spindles are the weakest point in these machines (well maybe the USB Port also) and mine sounds very tired sometimes. Sooner or later there will not be any replacements available.
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Post by Greg on Aug 27, 2019 17:21:12 GMT -8
Bob people are buying these machines cheap ripping out the electronics installing a router then running the system with Mach 3 or 4.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2019 19:07:14 GMT -8
I knew about using a router but they are really loud and the bearings are not really designed to run for long periods of time as in a spindle motor. I can run the machine with the electronics intact and use a different spindle motor, all you have to do is go into the gcode file I-picture generated and eliminate the spindle on and off command which is M03 for on and M05 for spindle stop. It has to be run off of a different power source and you have to turn it on and off manually but it works. Couple of years ago I bought a spindle off of Ebay that turned out to be underpowered as well, but I hooked it up and ran it on my 1013.
I also have the plan that Vectorclip 3D put out there a little while back that does what you mentioned, but that requires gutting / modifying the electronics on the machine. That would work fine if most of what you carved were the simple v carved signs, but most all the things I sell are the relief carvings depicting wildlife, emblems and such.
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Post by Greg on Aug 27, 2019 22:01:03 GMT -8
I built a much larger unit from scratch some years ago that uses a router and Mach this thing does not cut from side to side like our machines do and the cut time is more like 1 hour instead of 8 or 12.
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