CasaFrog Blogs

Ok, some folks restore old cars. Some collect baseball cards. Some are freaks for books. Manufacturing technology works for me, especially vintage gear. I’m continuously amazed at how the human race has been able to build upon speed, accuracy and capability from one generation of machine or tool to the next. On the surface, this [...]

One would think with Florida being the center of manufacturing, that finding some older iron to retrofit would be as easy as walking into the corner sto….. Okay, I can’t do it – it’s just too funny. Really? You mean Florida’s state orange color isn’t representative of rust? Hmmm….so you’re saying it’s NOT the optimum [...]

As crass as the title may be, it’s an accurate description. In fact, it probably applies to most lathes out there. It’s just part of the nature of using said equipment. I could tell from Richard’s pix a number of things: 1. It was stored outside. 2. The grass was green. 3. Some parts were [...]

“Every great work of art depicts a lack of planning.”  Courtesy of yours truly, perhaps stolen in part from others, but with my background in theatre, I think it holds true. I needed to decide if I wanted a work of art, or not. This wasn’t to be art. Thus, I needed…”the plan”. I was [...]

Paperwork time is over, walking around the machine is complete. Grab the boltcutters and cut everything you can wrap them around. No, thank you. I expect this to take some days, and slicing everything up just to trace it back again, isn’t the plan. Especially since I received so much paperwork – why waste it? [...]

Ok, so Mr. Bijur hums. For those not familiar with a Bijur clockwork metering pump, it is a wonderfully crafted piston pump used for low-dose automatic oiling. On the Tsugami (along with many other machine tools), a pump of this type is used to dispense low volumes of oil along the traveling ways of the [...]

Since I was on a roll with another project, as is liable to happen from time to time (and since it’s those projects that pay the mortgage), today won’t have too much time spent on the lathe. I probably should note that this is pretty much a solo effort – not a company of 20 [...]

Okay, so the Bijur pump wasn’t pumping. A handful of clockwork motors from the local surplus shop seemed promising. All of these surrogate motors were 110VAC, instead of the original 230. That’s not a issue, just something to make note of so I don’t smoke the motor later by tying it to, what I expect [...]

It’s time to spend some serious hours on this machine, just to lighten it up. Of course, it has been blocking the dock door since I received it, so really, I need to move it out of the way. I have a goal to have it off to the side, near our primary electrical panel, [...]

Thankfully, I don’t have an “ex”. Well, at least not yet. I do have an “X”. And it’s stuck. For a machine that is supposed to move in multiple axes, that is a problem. The Z axis still moves quite nicely (remember that I don’t have the lube system connected right now, so I’m not [...]

We last left off with a semi-stuck X axis, which after some more lubing, has become more manageable. The Yaskawa AC servos came in (700w – 22.6 Nm, 16mm shaft), a lot more worse-for-wear than anticipated, but after pulling off the large harmonic gear nose, a few minutes in the blast cabinet, and a new [...]

Okay, so I was resigned to having to deal with the low speed turret for tool changing due to the lackluster performance with the other clutch. What a wonder a day makes! My little Saftronics drives will run up to 400Hz, but unfortunately the Econobrake motor will not. I want to keep the motor voltage [...]

Happy Holidays to you all! I hope the season brought joy and safety to you and your families! Since I had left a lot of the parts sitting (curing/drying) over the Christmas weekend, they looked good enough to reassemble back onto the saddles. This is a placeholder page for the moment, until I can add [...]

I’ve been busy, so the lathe’s been sitting a bit – I’ve been fussing over both the headstock and the lube system – the lube manifold I’m not thrilled with as built, so I’m going to rework it using individual restrictors in each line. Part of the problems I was originally seeing was that one [...]

Ok, I have been quite tardy on my posts – this wasn’t actually written until the end of March, but thankfully, times have been busy. No complaints there. I did have complaints still about the lube manifold for the automatic way lube system. There was sufficient (wear) use on the system as a whole that [...]

It’s a wonderful moment – the axes have been run back and forth by my drives under manual control. Many things are grey, and for the most part, the individual components are all functional. It’s time to get to the “C” in the “CNC”! (or both C’s….if you wish) From the outset, I had decided [...]

An hour or so a day has been making headway fiddling with portions of the electrical panel – mostly in doing paperwork, securing materials, planning for the next stage etc. I was filing and scanning some of the other leftover documents (such as as the parameter sheets that were stuffed in the bottom of the [...]

Now time for the nitty-gritty; there’s lots of IO to manage here, and lots of potential to see smoke. I’m quite comfortable with 3 phase power – up to about 480VAC and 300 Amp services – we used that a lot in my lasershow days, and because that wasn’t dangerous enough, we also intentionally threw [...]

I have actually been dreading this moment – and putting off working on them for a long time. I even thought of just throwing them out and dropping cash on inductive sensors as to not have to deal with these pushbutton limit switches. These Mechanical Limit Switch assemblies were gunky, some completely locked up, expensive [...]

At this point, I have the limit switches wired in – there is no adjustment, per se, as the dogs are fixed to the plates. Of course, one could be justified in assuming that since this was a working (mass-produced) machine, that the limits are just as accurate now as they were when originally built. [...]

My intent on moving to examine the turret sensors was to shoot a nice little sequence of the LEDs turning on and off, make a cute little animated GIF and basically replicate the work I had done for the spindle. That was not to be the case. First, let’s spoil the surprise by stating all [...]

Although I was working on arrangement for the CPU for some time, I think I can finally call the unit complete.  Although there is a lot of room in a standard ATX case, or even a rack-mounted case, the pendant is something I wanted to look a little sexier. Ok, to be honest, I’d LOVE [...]

EMC2 got loaded without issue onto the HD of the Epia; I used a current EMC2 2.3.0 Live CD (http://www.linuxcnc.org/content/view/21/4/) with mostly default settings. I did change the GL video drivers to the “libgl-mesa-swx11″ package (just by adding it in the Synaptic manager) as I was getting video hash across the entire screen once any [...]

Although I have been accused of being an adult, thankfully I haven’t had anyone accuse me of being grown up yet, so a few careless treks off to yesteryear shouldn’t be too bad. To this point, there has been a fair concentration on the X and Z axes, a little cleanup of the chuck and [...]

(High Bandwidth version here) Tearing down the spindle indexer assembly couldn’t have been simpler – or more surprising! It’s incredible (and perhaps a little erroneous) to project today’s evolution of implementing a technology onto that of thirty years ago. Allow me to wax poetic: On the far left of the assembly is a 1024 line [...]

Just for fun, I was hoping to have the lathe turning over for (her) 30th birthday, which by the provisioning paperwork, would have been April 10th, 1980. So happy birthday! Not a lot of pictures here, so just a quick video to show it off. This is EMC2 running the “requisite” pawn profile. There’s a [...]

The “birthday run” yesterday while proving functionality, didn’t have optimized speeds, settings or tuning. The original 3 phase contactors I had installed also, were failing. They looked like NOS (new-old-stock) at Skycraft, but it is a surplus store, and you get what you get. I had picked up four of them originally (a GE unit [...]

Last weekend was a blast, spending my time rubbing elbows with celebrities and taking a casual (140+mph!) drive in a Lamborghini 640 driven by none other than Mr. Valentino Balboni (Lamborghini’s chief test driver)….nothing short of exciting! That was part of our time spent with the Celebration Exotic Car Festival, this year benefiting Special Olympics [...]

The lathe was running through some test cuts a while back; I had loaded some Nylon6 bar into the chuck, locked it down via air pressure, made up a little “end stuffer” to put in the far end of the spindle (since I’m short on spindle liners at the moment) – to reduce whip, and [...]

As I’ve been expanding the PyVCP panel for my installation, I’m so very glad that the TABS feature has been implemented. It can (will) make for a very long XML file, but to be honest, I like having a “backdoor” for testing and overrides. Like I ever expected to be “done” with this; of course [...]

-there’s a fair bit of hydraulics info to go in here once I get it rewritten -but we have made CNC cuts under EMC2 control, with gcode, with tooling, on material, with results as expected! -here’s a video placeholder while I build the rest of the page. Woohoo! Click here for download link if your [...]