Just got back from vacation and this was sitting on the porch waiting for me. Gonna take some time to rewire everything and get it going since my system is not exactly plug and play .
Really nice fit and finish on this thing. Only concern is the covers over the electrical components are plastic. Hopefully its a lot better plastic than what the connectors were mounted in on the Hiteco (those were pretty fragile).
Its seems really heavy, but I must have forgotten how heavy the Hiteco is in hand because the spec says its only a Kg more than than the Hiteco.
Install went very well. Took me about 2 hours, including grilling the bratz for dinner.
This thing is really quiet. The fan is powered by a 24V motor, so its constant speed relative to spindle rpm which makes it super quiet compared to the spindle powered fans at high rpm. The other nice thing is that since cooling is independent of rpm, you can run this one down to 1000 rpm (thats the spec).
The 4 tool holders are very good quality and come with nuts, and there is an assortment of collets as well.
The other thing thats really cool is it comes with a drill chuck tool holder. It also is very good qualitty (I measured about 0.0005" runout on one of my quarter inch endmils).
It comes with a power supply and air line and regulator to get it set up in manual mode with minimal effort. This is where Iām at right now since I need to add a Centroid ether1616 board to get more I/O before I can fully automate this for ATC capability.
I was thinking the same corbin, he should be able to set it up just like ours. Jim get eric to send you a link for the cncdepot instruction. Nothing else needed.
All drawbar functions, sensors, etc all run through an 8 pin cable. When we release our full ATC we will be using this plug to sense, and control the ATC functionality of the spindle.
For users that get them now the PLC on the spindle itself enables and disables the drawbar release button when itās safe to do so (by detecting power/air/rpm)
That was the first thing I noticed on my AV70S also, having come from the 3HP original spindle. It was so quiet I at first assumed something was wrong!
Oh yeah - I know it is different, I just meant Jim could just hook up the appropriate wire; it looks like Pin 1 of the M12 8P connector can just be used to wire up the drawbar command and he would be good to go!
@jjneeb I read through the AV40S setup; it looks like the M12 8-pin cable is connected directly to a 24volt power supply. You could connect that to a female connector (somewhere, maybe another box temporarily) that provides 24volts for the power and controls the drawbar signal on p1.
Or, you could run a shielded cable from the M12 box on the spindle itself, and tap directly into drawbar signal and wire that into your Ex control box for the āplasma torchā relay #6 output, and start playing around with ATC capabilities right away.
Ya, I could do that. However, actual ATC use of this spindle was my second priority (I actually had a RapidChange ATC and gave it away because I donāt really need an ATC very often). I got it because of the flexibility for manual changes, like I can put in a toolholder with a dowel in it for example to quickly use my touchplate, and then go back to a V bit, or get get a ER32 toolholder for when I want to use a tool with a 3/4" shank, or a long one with an ER16 collet for getting down into tight areas.
My auxilary control box is an embarrassing mess and I need to completely rewire it anyway. The thing I like about the ether1616 is that it lets you have totally isolated power relative to your Acorn controller. Its controlled via ethernet, but then you can have a bunch of seperate (5, 12, and 24V, whatever) supplies in another box and donāt have to tie back any grounds to the controller and worry about injecting noise back into the controller. The other thing is that I am definitely going to need more than 8 outputs eventually to control everything I want to do on my system, so I only want to do the re-wire once.
The other thing I have to do is look into the SW to drive the ATC, and set up toolholder locations, and Iām just too busy right now to do all that. Iām finding retirement is not full of free time lately
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