DC motor and speed controller for cnc lathe?
Simon Howes
Hi peeps!
My inverter on the cnc lathe I converted eons ago has given up the ghost. It suddenly turns on at infinite rpm or reverses direction or just sulks and does nothing. When it it not sulking it is utterly terrifying.
I have decided I now hate it
And want a divorce
But i was also thinking of divorcing ac induction motors which are basically induction heaters at low rpm and moving to a DC motor instead. This used to be infeasibly expensive.
A few years ago I felt myself a super expert at cnc, but now when I look on ebay i see water cooled dc 24KRPM motors and inverters for £130. Wow. Things have changed. I may grab one of these for my mill, but these are 10x too fast for my lathe.
Can anyone recommend a decent dc motor/speed controller for a cnc lathe? My lathe (a converted Orac) has no gearing and no damned room in the enclosure for it so it needs to provide consitent lowspeed torque and reliable speed. I have an encoder on the spindle already, so a servo system is a possibility
Something that took serial instructions would be cool, too. Mainly, I want a stable rpm. I could never do threading on my cnc lathe because the inverter/speed controller just werent stable enough (pulses for speed into analog for speed control via mach3 = sucky). Also, low end torque meant it was stallcity for threading with a die. The machine otherwise is a pleasure...
As usual, the ferrets in my head tell me to build an arduino thing
But I know I'd be a fool
Crowdsource, sing me the song of your 2KW DC motor/speed controller combo...
Adrian Godwin
stepper motor. The inverter is usually called a 'drive' and are made
by all the industrial controller people - AB, Omron, Mitsubishi,
Fanuc, Siemens, Rexroth (Indramat).
You need to match the drive to the motor fairly carefully and they're
often sold as complete systems.
-adrian