Multi axis Cnc lathe recomission- Remove your Caps.

Luckily, Jason found some fuel a week later and came down to work his magic. All in all a very long day. With a newer version of the ladder installed along with the parameters,we were greeted with two pages of error codes. We slowly worked our way through them all, clearing them as we went. The majority of them were related to the turret and axes being out of position due to them being moved manually to fit the transport stops. The toolchanger was totally hung up. We can only surmise that it must have been in a toolchange when the original C axis drive died, sending the machine into lockdown when it did.

Eventually got the error codes pretty much cleared apart from this. Five hours later and we were none the wiser and had exhausted most of the avenues to look down regarding these error codes. Given it was on all four of the axes,it was highly unlikely that all four encoders had failed. We must be missing something 🤔

And missing something we were….
Bear in mind this lathe came to me incomplete. The servo drive for the Y and C Aries had failed. The previous owner hadn’t wanted to spent £6500 on a new drive,so decided to send it Stateside for repair. That’s when TNT managed to take a leaf out of My Herpes book ,and lose the parcel. Being such generous folk,they compensated the previous owner….a whole £30 😳. Anyway, I found a good second hand drive and installed it. Pretty simple. All wires are factory labelled,so you can’t go wrong…can you? Turns out all wires present were correctly connected.However…. there must have been two wires still connected to the old drive that obviously I didn’t know about. Quick check on the wiring diagram,and bingo two wires shown that link the drives together.Powered up….


It’s happy…mostly

Got everything to move.😊 Spindle works. Turret works. All the axes work….to a degree

Y axis has an issue that is most likely the cause of the Y C servo drive failing.

Buried in the depths,the bolts connecting the servo motor to the Y axis ball screw have either come lose or sheared off, jamming up the axis. This can either be a bit of a crap job to tighten the bolts,or it can be a major mission. If the bolts are sheared it’s a three day job to strip the turret out, having to disassemble most of the machine to get the ball screw out. 😕

Progress is good progress, it seems to be fighting you all the way though!

I just sit here slack jawed in amazement!

Sorry to see the X axis is an ex-axis, hopefully you can repair or replace?

Seeing this is going to require a fair amount of electronic work to sort out the drive ,I decided to buy a solder/ desolder station. Should make electronic component replacement so much easier with the electric vacuum gun

Surgery started

A little while later all the hot glue that was used to secure the capacitors to the board is removed

Should of bought one of these rework stations years ago, speeds things up considerably

Just waiting on three more capacitors from Rs, and then it will be time to try again

31 capacitors replaced on the middle board. Four of which were confirmed dead, two had exploded and thrown monkey jizz all over the board.Seeing they are all the same age, time to replace the lot.  Ready for hot glue and conformal coating of the resoldered joints to stop corrosion.

Second out, round number 2 🤣

Reinstalled back into the drive, just need to finish the top board and the drive can go back in