Well the CNC Mill is now sitting in the workshop. Hooray!
I just love looking at this thing. So many cool features and upgrades over my current manual mill. Not taking anything away from my current machine, it's a good quality Taiwanese made tool room mill. An real industrial machine and not a toy. The new one is just another few steps up again.
Some of the cool extra features are the constant variable speed head. Rather than having to stop and change belts to adjust the cutter speed you just dial up the speed you want with the crank handle on the side. The cutter speed is displayed on the front of the head.
It's got an air powered draw bar which makes changing tools much quicker. No need to put a spanner on the draw bar while holding the spindle brake and unscrewing the draw bar to release the tool. With this one it's just the press of a button to change tools.
The other thing it has that I'd been wanting to fit to my manual mill is a mist cooling system. This sprays a jet of air with a coolant fluid mixed in with it. This keeps the cutting tool and work piece cool while blowing the chips out of the way. The current system is flood coolant which is a stream of just straight coolant that flows over the cutter and work piece. The disadvantage of this shows when using a big cutter or high cutter speeds as it splashes coolant all over the place. Also with a flood of coolant flowing around the tool it can be hard to see what's going on with the cut. Mist cooling systems are a total loss system. Coolant is supplied from a tank that you need to refill periodically but it is spayed in much smaller volume. The flood coolant setup has a sump in the foot of the mill where the coolant drains to and is pumped back up to the nozzle. After a while the sump can get pretty nasty and needs cleaning out (not a fun job).
So why is the new machine still sitting in the middle of the floor??!!
Well there are few jobs to do before I can get it in and running. That flood coolant on the manual mill has made a bit of a mess on the floor over the years so I've got to give the floor a good scrub before moving the CNC mill in.
The CNC mill is also 3 Phase powered where I only have single Phase power available in the workshop... Hmmm
The old Cincinnati Tool master mill that I rebuilt years ago was also a 3 Phase machine. I sorted that by rewiring it and adapting a single phase motor to the head. It also had a constant variable speed head which I really liked.
I thought about using a VSD (Variable Speed Drive) to run the motor on the CNC mill as they are readily available for running 3 phase motors from single phase power. But I would also have to sort out single phase power supply modules for the control systems and mess with all the wiring. Just too many possibilities to stuff something up compared to that simple old Cincinnati machine.
I decided to relent and install 3 Phase power in the shed. However it was going to be way to costly to bring it in from the street as that would have meant pulling in new cable, modifications to the house switchboard and a new meter. New cable pulled through from the house switchboard to a new sub board in the workshop etc... A lot of work, time and expense. I installed a Phase Change converter. This is a device that converts single phase power and produces a clean accurate true 415 Volt 3 Phase feed. This one is rated at 4KW/5.5HP which is bigger than I need for the 3HP motor on the mill but I figured in the future I'd like to put a CNC plasma table in the shed and a decent plasma power source will need a bit more get up and go.
Here's a link to their site if you want to read about how they work. A local Australian company too.
http://www.phasechanger.com/
This past weekends job was installing the Phase changer and getting it running. It's direct wired in via a dedicated 6mm feed back to switchboard. It's overkill for what it will draw but it's a long cable run at nearly 40M and the manual recommends 6mm for a longer cable run and there's not much price difference between 4mm and 6mm cable (and about the same effort to run in). The Phase changer terminates to a 10Amp 3 Phase outlet on the wall. It's a fairly central location in the workshop so I can run a lead back to it from whatever machine I'm running.
Got to tidy up the Sub woofer wiring hanging behind the phase changer though (got to have good tunes in the shed)
So the advantage of this setup is there is no need to mess around with the mill. Just plug it in and away it goes. I've got some time off over Christmas so it'll be a fun job for the break.
Still excited about it all
Cheers