It took alll !@#&(*$ day!!!
*Sigh...*
It took all day to install the DRO onto my mill-drill...
BUT...
I DID get it installed!!!
Hot damn!!! *HAPPY DANCE*
Alll the bloody friggin' details behind the .
And so... I woke up with all the hopes of getting things put together like... inside of a few hours.
But, the first thing I needed was some screws from Lowes. And so I went, bought the screws, had some early lunch, and came back...
All my tools were spread between the garage and basement. So, things went S_L_O_W as I went back and forth always looking for a tool. I started working on the "Y" axis, and to install it, I had to make some sort of plate to go between the table and the base that transferred the motion from the table to the sensor unit on the slide. I made it out of 8th inch aluminum plate material. It was horrible to cut, since I didnt have any coolant, the mill cutter was dull, and the aluminum was not a very machinable alloy (like 1100 or something like it).
Anyway, i cut it... like a hot dull mill through aluminum... (as opposed to the cliche phrase)... and cleand it up with a few more very light passes before drilling the holes and mounting it. I had to use spacers to get things to work right, which I just stacked washers up to serve the purpose. Anyway, the image below is of the "Y" axis mounted.
Then I did the "X" axis. This one should have been simpler, but I think in retrospect, for some stinken reason it really wasnt. I kept farting around with spacers that werent just right. Always something wasnt aligned just right, and I would swap out some combination of washers, nuts and spacers trying to make it work. Finally I managed to get it just right... or... at least right enough.
And the following picture is of the overall setup, showing the mill, the laptop in the back, that runs the DRO software that I found off the internet.
The software is really cool, and alows for use of any kind of quadrature encoder. It can do english and metric units, and has a lot of other bells and whistles type of features that I really dont even need. I am just tickled to be able to move the table and not have to count turns of the handle! To be able to zero a position and not have to do math to figgure out where I am in reference to a location. Ohh.. one feature it has that I actually DO like is a linear velocity display... if you are cutting a material and dont have any means by which to gage how fast you are moving the material through the cutter, this solves that problem. In metal cutting, thats actually VERY important.
The following is a screenshot of the software in operation.
And this is the cheesy little interface board I made.. Just a few op-amps acting like schmitt-trigger zero-crossing detectors that sit between the linear scales that output a 350mV p-p sinusoid turning it into a 0 to 3.5Vdc square wave to the parallel port of the computer.
ALLLlll of this, just so I can machine the back panel of a cabinet for this stinkin' test bench project that wont end..... But I am not going to start cutting on a 120 dollar cabinet, which should I screw up, will probably require I spend another $120! :(
Ohh well... I have DRO though... and I'z a happy machinist vixen... Whenever I have time to start making other mechanical projects, I look forward to doing it with much less hassle due to this little endeavor.
It took all day to install the DRO onto my mill-drill...
BUT...
I DID get it installed!!!
Hot damn!!! *HAPPY DANCE*
Alll the bloody friggin' details behind the .
And so... I woke up with all the hopes of getting things put together like... inside of a few hours.
But, the first thing I needed was some screws from Lowes. And so I went, bought the screws, had some early lunch, and came back...
All my tools were spread between the garage and basement. So, things went S_L_O_W as I went back and forth always looking for a tool. I started working on the "Y" axis, and to install it, I had to make some sort of plate to go between the table and the base that transferred the motion from the table to the sensor unit on the slide. I made it out of 8th inch aluminum plate material. It was horrible to cut, since I didnt have any coolant, the mill cutter was dull, and the aluminum was not a very machinable alloy (like 1100 or something like it).
Anyway, i cut it... like a hot dull mill through aluminum... (as opposed to the cliche phrase)... and cleand it up with a few more very light passes before drilling the holes and mounting it. I had to use spacers to get things to work right, which I just stacked washers up to serve the purpose. Anyway, the image below is of the "Y" axis mounted.
Then I did the "X" axis. This one should have been simpler, but I think in retrospect, for some stinken reason it really wasnt. I kept farting around with spacers that werent just right. Always something wasnt aligned just right, and I would swap out some combination of washers, nuts and spacers trying to make it work. Finally I managed to get it just right... or... at least right enough.
And the following picture is of the overall setup, showing the mill, the laptop in the back, that runs the DRO software that I found off the internet.
The software is really cool, and alows for use of any kind of quadrature encoder. It can do english and metric units, and has a lot of other bells and whistles type of features that I really dont even need. I am just tickled to be able to move the table and not have to count turns of the handle! To be able to zero a position and not have to do math to figgure out where I am in reference to a location. Ohh.. one feature it has that I actually DO like is a linear velocity display... if you are cutting a material and dont have any means by which to gage how fast you are moving the material through the cutter, this solves that problem. In metal cutting, thats actually VERY important.
The following is a screenshot of the software in operation.
And this is the cheesy little interface board I made.. Just a few op-amps acting like schmitt-trigger zero-crossing detectors that sit between the linear scales that output a 350mV p-p sinusoid turning it into a 0 to 3.5Vdc square wave to the parallel port of the computer.
ALLLlll of this, just so I can machine the back panel of a cabinet for this stinkin' test bench project that wont end..... But I am not going to start cutting on a 120 dollar cabinet, which should I screw up, will probably require I spend another $120! :(
Ohh well... I have DRO though... and I'z a happy machinist vixen... Whenever I have time to start making other mechanical projects, I look forward to doing it with much less hassle due to this little endeavor.