[Guldberg]

After building a couple of machines from the ground up, I finally bought my first full size router and why start small. Its a 6.5 ton beast, made by german Reichenbacher back in 1993. Its a model RANC 323 AW and features a Sinumerik 810M GA2 controller. It even comes with a cabinet full of tools.

I started a company with two other guys and the machine is going to serve as a proof of concept for our business model.

The plan is to use it as it is to begin with, but we want to upgrade the controller sometime in the future. The servo drives is in good shape and can possible be reused. There is a PLC controlling the toolchanger etc. and the plan is to integrated it into the new control.

[cabnet636]

looks like fun to me!!

[Guldberg]

Today a large truck arrived with the goodies. Got it unloaded fairly easy. Tomorrow a 20' container is delivered. This is part of a fence that are going to enclose our little area in this giant building

[svenakela]

You're crazy dude! I like it.
next time I pass by DK I will stop by. I believe that the hardcore EMC2 guys would love to make that machine running with changer and everything.

[jeffrey001]

Is this your shop in your basement


Nice building


Jeff

[diyengineer]

What did something like that cost ya? Did you grab it from an auction or? What do you plan on doing with it?



You are crazy, and i like that.

[Guldberg]

Please do stop by. We rented some space in the old shipyard in the middle of Copenhagen (B&W), this is one of the "smaller" sub-assembly halls. The shipyard closed back in '96, we are trying to bring some production back to the site, wont be long until we occupies the entire building!

Got the machine at a furniture factory at a total prices of around 1900$ (+taxes). The transportation set us back another 2k$

[LeeWay]

I married my first wife in Odense. Really nice place.
I like the space you have there. I was in the US Army in Germany and we had buildings that looked very similar to that for our motor pool. Nice overhead cranes and railroad tracks running the length.
We rebuilt everything from Jeeps to M60 tanks with no trouble.

Looking forward to seeing this thing go. Don't you hate it when shipping costs more than the purchase?
In this case, however, the purchase price was mighty low. Very cool.

[diyengineer]

Please do stop by. We rented some space in the old shipyard in the middle of Copenhagen (B&W), this is one of the "smaller" sub-assembly halls. The shipyard closed back in '96, we are trying to bring some production back to the site, wont be long until we occupies the entire building!

Got the machine at a furniture factory at a total prices of around 1900$ (+taxes). The transportation set us back another 2k$

Holy crap! As in $USD? What a steal!

[chich2]

Well Done Guldberg!
Nice looking machine!

Chich

[Guldberg]

Last night we did the final assembly and tried to fire it up, but no matter what we did it wouldn't clear a error 2000 - Emergency stop. It doesn't exactly help either, that the control is in German. None of the e-stop nor limits are activated, so either a contact is broken or something is wrong software wise

[GeWeKe]

Hope you can fire her up soon, a bit outdated but this is one monster you got there... guess the boards and wiring set up gotta have some look thru...

[diyengineer]

Worst comes to worst you could covert it over to mach 3.

You can always ship it to me

[cheetahcnc]

What a great deal. The tooling is worth that.

[Guldberg]

I manage to get the axis going. I kinda pushed every reset button inside the cabinet. Something must have rattle loose during transport.

The damn thing is still in German, so next step is to try and change that to English. Unfortunately I have very little time to play around with it, hopefully next week there will be more time.

We did thought of converting it to mach3, but after having a look at it, it seams like a huge task. There are something like 100 i/o for various sensors, vales and relays. Right now im looking at a never siemens controller, the 802c, at least hardware wise, it should be a drop-in replacement. For the right person, It may even be possible to just covert the old S5 PLC program to the new S7 PLC

[diyengineer]

I manage to get the axis going. I kinda pushed every reset button inside the cabinet. Something must have rattle loose during transport.

The damn thing is still in German, so next step is to try and change that to English. Unfortunately I have very little time to play around with it, hopefully next week there will be more time.

We did thought of converting it to mach3, but after having a look at it, it seams like a huge task. There are something like 100 i/o for various sensors, vales and relays. Right now im looking at a never siemens controller, the 802c, at least hardware wise, it should be a drop-in replacement. For the right person, It may even be possible to just covert the old S5 PLC program to the new S7 PLC

Ya that thing looks pretty high tech compared to a simple 3 axis machine. Any videos of it yet? Pictures say so little haha.

[bill south]

Now that my friend, is a ROUTER!!!
Mine is much smaller.
Good find and good luck with your new business.
Bill

[Guldberg]

Just a quick update. We kinda got it up and running full speed now. Its even doing its toolchanges very nicely:-) First thing to cut was a small sign with the text "cofab.dk",turned out we need to choose a very very simple text format consisting only of straight lines, to keep it under the memory limit. If that wasn't enough, it fails if we try to transfer at any speed higher than 1200 baud!! Even something as small as 7kb takes a long time (> 1 minute) at this speed.

This has got us to thinking on converting it again. Right now we have two options as I see it.

1. Mach3 + PLC
2. Sinumerik 802d sl + ADC converter

I will talk to Siemens next week and see if they by any chance would like to participate in the project. It could be a showcase of the future production system when finished. Not the machine by itself, but the whole system we are building

[svenakela]

Not to be grumpy, but why do you ignore EMC2? It will run your machine like a charm.

[Guldberg]

Im pretty familiar with mach3 from my other machines + I know nothing of linux + the boards I have in sight for the analog drives, Kflop from dynomotion or DSPMC/IP only have a Mach3 plugin.

I like the idea of a linux machine as a more "robust" platform, but with a dedicated driver board, im not relying on the windows kernel driver of mach3. With a proper crafted PC, im pretty sure I can build a stable machine