[ibuildstuff4u]

Santa brought me a new milling machine to replace my over worked X2 and I decided to convert it to CNC right away. I will probably get a second G0704 down the road to use as a manual mill but for now I will make due with just a CNC machine.

For the conversion I went with Hoss plans and ordered double ball nuts for the ball screws. I'm going to replace the stock spindle motor with a three phase AC motor in the near future and already have a phase converter installed in the control box. The stepper drives are digital drives from automation tech and the breakout board is an all in one motion controller / breakout board from PMDX. Control software will be Mach 4.

I have all of the conversion parts made up and just finished wiring up the control box. Hopefully next week I can take the mill apart and install the ball screws and motors.

Work and family takes up most of my time, but hopefully I can have this machine up and running in a few months.

Dale P.

[Boondocker]

Nice looking control cabinet.

What kind of connectors are those?

[ibuildstuff4u]

Thanks,

The connectors are Speakon connectors and are usually used for professional PA speakers. They have four contacts and are rated for up to 20 amps. The large connector is also a Speakon jack and has 8 contacts which Im using to hook up my limit switches and the E-stop. I really like the Speakon connectors because they are pretty reasonable in price and are really robust unlike the cheap mike jacks that are used on some systems. The best place to get Speakon jacks is Parts Express. They also sell Powercon jacks which are really nice for inputting 120vac into an enclosure, or for hooking up power to a spindle. The only issue is they only have three conductors so I wasn't able to use it for my project as I need four conductors to run to the spindle.

The two outlets on the bottom are controlled by the two digital relays and will be used to control a coolant pump or vacuum. I set the box up so I can easily move it to another machine because I want to build a CNC router in the future and won't have the funds for a separate control box right away.

Dale P.

Dale P.

[CS900]

I use the same connectors on my mill. they work great!

[charliex]

nice box, what kind of noise do you get off that VFD or is it being filtered?, mine generated hella noise enough to cause disruption to other controls/power had to add various filters to it.