So, whilst waiting for the CCU to be repaired,I carried on cleaning. A nice surprise was finding out it had two coolant pumps, one seen here partway through cleaning. Before I started I had no idea the base of it was grey,or that part of it was red, that’s how dirty they were 😡 So, why so excited about two pumps? Well, the one does the normal coolant spray,but the other is a rather sort after option that costs about £5k to have fitted. Through the spindle coolant. More about that in a future post. Not going to show you the tank when I started. Trust me when I say it was rank.... Think along the lines of a midget taking a bath in yogurt, totally submerged so you cannot see him. Only reason you can tell he is there is an occasional bubble when he farts ....Coolant is grim stuff when left to it’s own devices. Tramp oil,( no,not oil squished out of tramps by mechanical reclamation processes 🤣), but Slideway oil that lands up in the coolant having,well, errr, lubricated the Slideway, forms a barrier on the top of the coolant. It’s then the perfect environment for anaerobic bacteria to grow in. Anyway, it was proper growing,complete with pus puddles and bracket fungi. Seeing I am a fun guy, I will spare you the photo Roughly a day into cleaning the tank. Most traces of mankiness removed It’s clean right? Wrong. A common mistake made by many. Everything cleaned and just a case of chucking new coolant in. Well, you can do that, but you won’t be happy for long. That tank,even though it’s cleaned out is still contaminated, as are the pumps. Before new coolant is added, I will flush the whole system out with bleach, followed by a weak solution of caustic soda. Cleaning the tank is probably the worst job out the way
Worst job ever as an apprentice was cleaning the coolant tanks on the old Herbert 2d turret lathes after being abused all year the day of the Xmas break up you would smell it for weeks on you hands
Worst job ever as an apprentice was cleaning the coolant tanks on the old Herbert 2d turret lathes after being abused all year the day of the Xmas break up you would smell it for weeks on you hands
The worst one was always the Radial Arm Drill, as it got used infrequently, took ages to do anything,so operator had loads of time for a smoke and sarnies. Coolant always full of fag butts and bread crusts 🤮
One of the idiosyncrasies of these XYZ vertical machining Centers must be the design of their coolant trays. I generally level all my machines on the high side,something I do as I am rather tall and the higher the machine is, the better. Generally, I wind all the adjusting screws all the way out whilst the machine is still on the crane having been offloaded from the truck. Skate the machine into place, level it and your good to go. It’s a personal preference, I’m lazy and at the stage where I try to work smarter, not harder. Its much easier to have the weight of a machine help you unwind an adjusting screw, than having it fight you if you try and wind it in to level,lifting the weight of the machine in the process.
So, what’s this all about then? If you level these machines as close to the ground as possible, you run into a problem. The coolant tank will not physically fit under the machine. ☹️ Which then means more work in jacking the machine up and relevelling it to get the tank in. Or,if you are like the previous owner,you can hit the castors with a gurt big hammer,bending the studs if you are “lucky” or destroying the swivel in the process if you are not. 🙄. So new castors ordered with M10 threads to replace all the bent and broken castors.
Moving on, let’s just quickly fit the extortionately priced Mcb’s then shall we? Err...no... that’s not going to happen either,without a fight... The two new Mcb’s I was told would fit this board, next to one that actually does After much messing around,taking plastic clips off,etc, it turns out the copper busbars in the unit are wider than the slots in the new Mcb’s and won’t physical fit in. Back to the Electrical Wholesaler it is then....Grrr... Don’t you just hate it when things just constantly transpire against you?
My tame sparky has a load of different sized bus bars screwed to his garage wall carrying spares for this very reason. There is so much variance between brands and even batches within brands.
Ive got a few left over from my self employed elctrickery days, 2no C32 SP, 1no C20 TP and 1no C63 TP, if you want them PM your address and I will stick them in the post
Ive got a few left over from my self employed elctrickery days, 2no C32 SP, 1no C20 TP and 1no C63 TP, if you want them PM your address and I will stick them in the post
I used to love going back into work after a shutdown and peeling the thick layer of white mould build up off of the top of the coolant. We used a synthetic coolant at that too which was supposed to be anti-bacterial.
Whenever I used to go onto someone else's machine I used to dig the tank out as one of my first jobs as they were all slovenly buggers, particularly the roughers. I'd probably get about 8 barrows full of grit and shite out of a tank before I was happy with it.
So, into the van and off to the Electrical Wholesaler. First thing to know,is it’s pretty rural around these parts. There are industrial estates,but most are converted farm buildings. There is a newish ,let that read more conventional industrial estate with car stealerships,electrical wholesalers,hydraulics etc in Parkwood. Accessible from where I am by narrow lanes. Most of these narrow lanes are clearly marked as such. 6,6ft wide. Not suitable for vehicles over 6,5 tonnes. No HGV,s. So ,off we go. Half way down a narrow lane that has 10 foot hedges either side and everybody is reversing back towards me. This is going to be fun. Stupid bint in a Rangerover behind me decides everybody is stupid and she is going to turn around....yeah right 🙄. Five hundred manoeuvres later and she now has her vehicle firmly wedged between two hedges. ....grr. Long story short ,half an hour later I get out the lane. And why ,you ask? Because some stupid French Twat decided the signs and restrictions don’t apply to his 30t Artic carrying Goulade cheese 😡😡.
So, out of the mayhem, Artic nowhere in sight as it passed me as I parked up in somebody’s driveway to initialise TwatNav. All the backed up traffic still pouring out the lane,so diversion needed. Turn left onto main road, left again into the next lane. Halfway down the lane....Yep ,no word of a lie, Twat features and his Artic now blocking this lane, again clearly identified as not suitable for Hgvs 😡😡.
Morning gone by the time I get to the Wholesaler. “ Just file the bus bar down” ...err, no.. why don’t you shove this contractor where the sun doesn’t contact? Refund given. Off to next wholesaler. Much ooohing and aaahing and sucking through teeth, but I did get sage advise. Yes, they are hard to find , but they are still available from Eaton for stupid money ,( try £90 + vat). So, because of this ,nobody stocks them. However, all is not lost as the nice man sells me three single breakers and gives me a quick tutorial.... All the 3 phase ones are ,are three singles coupled together with some extra parts,which I can liberate from a 16A unit I had. So all sorted. Done and dusted, we have a power supply ....
Day is pretty much done. Ok, new castors have arrived. Quick and easy job right? Wrong..... It’s a metric machine built in a Taiwan with German controls retrofitted in the Uk at the factory. Not a twelfty thirds bolt in sight....apart,from the bottom of the coolant tray...let’s make that imperial shall we 😡. So, M10 castors won’t fit into 3/8” tapped holes. Retap to M10. Job done right? Wrong.... what’s wrong with this picture? Locked up and went home. I is not amused.....
By this stage the will to live was not so strong.Still no sign of the repaired CCU unit., and I was getting tired of , “ We are waiting for parts,that will be here tomorrow “ Email the following week to hear , “ We are waiting for Unicorn scales”, followed the next week by, “ We are waiting for Chicken leather”. The excuses were getting more and more far fetched. I lost my rag... NINE weeks into a THREE week repair they incurred the wrath of Johnny. “ Bottom line,can you fix it or nor?” “ Errr...welll...uh uh uh...” Don’t bother send it back.... What really boiled my piss was I could have bought a good second hand one six weeks earlier for £2000...Of course ,now that I needed another unit,it was long since gone.
So, I sent the old one back to an independent ,Siemens trained engineer, who made no bones about it. There is nobody in the U.K. who can repair these boards. Only one person in Germany that does it,with the approval of Siemens. Why do they fail? It’s all got to do with cleanliness,once again. If you don’t clean the filters on the electrical cabinet frequently,the filter blocks up. If it blocks up, the fan is strong enough to pull the whole filter slightly forward, and unfiltered air gets deposited onto the boards. Bit of moisture drawn in and deposited onto the silver contacts on the surface mounted components and you have nice galvanic corrosion eating the tracks on the board away. Made worse by BGA chips. Basically an IC with an array of connections underneath it,that are extremely difficult to replace, they need to be positioned with micron accuracy. The company in Germany does it robotically and xrays the solder joints afterwards.
Here is a video of a layperson removing one rather barbarically,but you can see what it looks like underneath 🤣
Sounds like a stray French artic is the least of your worries.
Many years ago I used to taxi and the main rank was by the station. At least once a month, we'd be treated to the sight of a foreign artic jamming himself underneath, as the driver's ability to convert feet and inches into metres alluded him until it was just too late. Oh how we laughed!
West Coast Main Line too, so train delays cost the drivers dear!
