Put a VFD on my Bport mill

http://www.wolfautomation.com/Produc...roductID=18805

I bought the above VFD in a 5hp model, I had a grizzly lathe on order that had a 4hp 3 phase motor on it. Got tired of endless back order on the lathe, and I bought a 2hp single phase lathe.

I had been running the bridgeport on a static phase converter since it was new in 1982.

So I put the VFD on the mill, if I ever NEED a 5hp VFD I have one, and can just buy a 2hp for the mill.

The VFD is a HUGE improvement, the mill is a vari speed so I really do not need speed control, if I do it is there however.

I wired the Bport motor to the VFD outputs, and I used my ohm meter and found the proper contacts in the original drum switch to wire to the proper terminals on the VFD terminal strip to start and stop the motor in forward or reverse.

The motor did make a whistling sounds, sort of a high pitched hum with default carrier frequency of 6kHz, via paramter I set it to 4kHz and there is now only a slight noise when it accels or decels the motor.

Bill

What was the "Huge" improvement? Can you elaborate? Joe

Well I had a static phase converter before. That meant if you went forward, lets say you were power tapping, when you got to depth you had to go to STOP, brake the spindle, wait for the relay to click a couple times in the converter, and reverse. If you DID flip right to reverse which is a common habit if you work all day with machines not running static phase converters it keeps right on running the same direction :-).

With the VFD you can flip right from fwd to reverse.

The VFD ramps up to speed too, and you can vary the amount of ramp time, and it ramps down to stop, and you can vary the ramp down time, and it can dc brake, which I have it set to do, so it STOPS a lot faster then it did before, and without using the hand brake.

This is a vari speed Bport so I really do not need to use the vfd to change the motor speed, but I can do so if I want to.

Overall the mill runs nicer than if it was on pure 3 phase in my opinion.

Bill