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Bridgeport R2E4 CNC issues

Swimmster

Plastic
Joined
Nov 28, 2019
Good morning all,

So I have finally acquired this machine from my uncle's shop. It's sat for 7 years, however, worked flawless when it was last operated. Verified that as I was there when it was operating last. It's been sitting collecting dust otherwise. So after disassembling the head to get it to clear my garage door at home, we loaded it up and brought it home. Once back together, I connected it up to the 3 phase inverter that American Rotary said would be NO problem. This phase inverter came with the lathe I purchased a month or so prior and works fantastic for the lathe. New to those inverters, so, when he said i could connect it up, I thought AWESOME!! so yeah.. it's not very awesome.. I hooked it up, powered the machine on and it booted fine to the main screen with several corruption errors and a drive fault. I pushed the drive enable button and heard the relays click, but no other responses.. pressing enter to home, pressing execute, etc resulted in no action except the drive fault still being there. Pressing acknowledge button just turned off the drive relays. Upon opening the control box door, a nice little plume of smoke came out... Going thru the voltage checks, it appears I'm getting 139vdc to the controller boards and 31v where there should be 24v. Now strangely, all the status LED's show perfectly normal. I can watch them go thru their tests, etc.. I have discovered that on a 3 phase converter, one leg will be high voltage.. In my case, it ranges from 260-270 volts. I have since changed the wiring to send that high leg strictly tot he spindle motor. and keep the control power supplies off that wild side. What are your thoughts on having possibly fried the board, or just the transformer got too hot and smoked? I would say the drive relays were closed for maybe 15 seconds tops... not sure what these boards will actually take. I have a lead on a full set of drive control boards for a decent price and they are known good boards. I just do not want to have to buy them if I;m overlooking something simple.

my other question is the air supply. can I run this machine without air temporarily? I need to trace down an air leak and I have a very inadequate small compressor that can't keep up the 75 psi that the book calls for.

Please let me know if you need more information. Looking forward to getting into production. Retrofit will be down the road as soon as funds allow. Thank you in advance for any information, insight, etc to help get this machine back going again.
 
Once yah let the magic smoke out......

It is so hard to say, start looking for the burnt part....

If you input two 240 volt legs into the rotary converter, I have not had smoke creating incidents when driving CNC equipment, although they will fault

Bridgeport made pretty well put together stuff

You may need air to operate the machine, try it at least to see if it works with air

Does the machine react the same way post smoke?
 
Yes, still does exactly the same.. Is there a way to bypass the air pressure sensor switch? no idea where it even is. noticed it was somewhat in the same line as all the stop switches on the schematic. When I rewired the wild leg to just the spindle, moving IL3 over to IL1, this fixed my high voltage issue. I now have 131 volts DC at the controllers. Not too far from 128vdc.. Still have the drive fault. Also, I can not access the logs. I can get the log screen by pressing Help button, but no other input works for accessing a log file. Going to pull the other boards and do the chip pressing routine to see if there's any corrosion, etc that is causing a bad connection. Occasionally on boot up, I get a list of faults and corruption errors.. next reboot, only the drive fault. I've cleaned all the limit switches and tested them for functionality. Really hoping to save this thing for a while. lol.
 
Also,, Pulled all the boards and did the chip press procedure.. heard a couple creeks here n there.. but it all still had no effect.. I suppose I need to find an appropriate way to tell for certain if the drive control boards are shot. It seems that all else comes up and all LED status lights read what they are supposed to read. 4 blue wires coming from the drive boards. top and bottom are currently 131 volts input. They go into what appears to be very large transistors. I'm guessing the other 2 blue wires in the middle are output lines to each axis motor.. could bad or stuck brushes in the axis motors cause this? I have experienced allot of woodworking type equipment that would no longer function due to brush issues. Notably, sitting in a basement with damp air causing the brushes to stick over time.
 
If your drives are not enabling, it has nothing to do with brushes
You need air to make the drives enable if it is shown on the EMO string
An find out where the smoke got out.
 
it's been a long time since I've worked on one of those (but not long enough). I seem to recall each drive was connected to 2 legs, So X was L1/L2, Y was L2/L3 and Z was L1/L3. I doubt this is ideal for using a converter and my guess is you blew up a drive.
There are several power supplies on the machine, and they are very unreliable. Check them all.
I used to have 2 of these POS, if I hadn't been able to swap cards back and forth to troubleshoot, I probably would never had been able to keep them running.
 
Tried swapping cards.. that did nothing.. I have one of the service manuals downloaded and am pouring thru.. I need to disable the air requirement for the moment.. I can get to 75psi, but for about a few seconds before it starts dropping below that spec. I can operate the tool changer barely.. I only want to eliminate the air requirement for troubleshooting purposes. Currently have all power in spec. I need to find out my voltages for this small transformer that seems to be feeding 2 bridge rectifiers. To make sure that is within spec. Trying to read a ton as well as web searches, and of course, you knowledgeable folks. I understand these systems are totally not ideal.. especially with what today has to offer. Takes money to make money and i don't have the funds to go crazy with this machine today. But I need it up and running to make some money. I have a potential source of income if I can get it turning out some parts. Should pay for a retrofit within a couple months.
 
FYI, extremely close inspection, bright light, magnifiers, etc.. I can NOT find a single thing burned on a board.. But I find it hard to believe I would smoke a transformer and not a board? I have a source for replacement drive boards. I can get all 3 from a previously known good machine. Do I want to part with the funds to find out it's not the boards.. hmmmmmmmmmmmm..
 
Just ordered the drive boards.. will see if this takes care of it.. all transformers putting out per spec plus maybe 2 volts.. checked EVERYTHING possible for correct voltage. has got to be drive boards smoked? if not.. I'll have spares apparently.
 
did you give it air?


Yes. Got the air pressure to maintain about 85PSI.. still nothing.. Pulled a drive board again to closely inspect again.. noticed some residue on the very bottom of one of the power transistors.. looked simply like it was dirt.. Then I noticed the rest of the cabinet is very clean. Upon putting my nose to it, pooooof.. It's that distinct grey ghost residue... All three boards have only one of those transistors that has similar residue on them.. all three smell the same.. very distinct silicon burning smell. Hopefully the damage is confined to those specifically. I can replace those transistors and have spare boards.. New boards should be here in about a week. Otherwise, been spending time cleaning this machine...
 
My Bridgeport came with a large warning sticker to not use a VFD for the electronics. The electronics will operate fine on single phase 220 volt. Use the VFD to solely drive the 3 phase spindle motor. I don't think the air has anything to do with your problems...but it must have a considerable leak to not hold pressure. It should be easy to find with the hissing!
 
My Bridgeport came with a large warning sticker to not use a VFD for the electronics. The electronics will operate fine on single phase 220 volt. Use the VFD to solely drive the 3 phase spindle motor. I don't think the air has anything to do with your problems...but it must have a considerable leak to not hold pressure. It should be easy to find with the hissing!

Yeah.. I can barely hear any hissing.. and the comp
ressor is SMALLLL... with a very small piston, so it takes not much at all for it to not keep up.. And yes, the VFD would only be for the spindle motor.
 
Thank you all for being here to bounce some thoughts off of.. the new set of boards worked!! actually, it was the drive controller board that worked.. So I now have 3 good spare drive cards if anyone needs one. or 3.. also, the residue I mentioned on the cards I have, is exactly the same on these replacements.. Apparently its dust from the fans blowing on the bottom.. So anyhow.. I'm back up and running.. Now I'm getting educated on this antique laptop that came with the machine with the extremely old EZCAM and EZUTIL software. Even have the original floppy disks.. Need to go from Autodesk Inventor down to this oldschool stuff. Anyone know if the newest versions of EZCAM will work? Looking at some drip feed type software as well.

Again, THANK YOU ALL for letting me vent about this and for offering excellent suggestions on where to look.
 
Thank you all for being here to bounce some thoughts off of.. the new set of boards worked!! actually, it was the drive controller board that worked.. So I now have 3 good spare drive cards if anyone needs one. or 3.. also, the residue I mentioned on the cards I have, is exactly the same on these replacements.. Apparently its dust from the fans blowing on the bottom.. So anyhow.. I'm back up and running.. Now I'm getting educated on this antique laptop that came with the machine with the extremely old EZCAM and EZUTIL software. Even have the original floppy disks.. Need to go from Autodesk Inventor down to this oldschool stuff. Anyone know if the newest versions of EZCAM will work? Looking at some drip feed type software as well.

Again, THANK YOU ALL for letting me vent about this and for offering excellent suggestions on where to look.
I use EZ Link and the rs232 port with master cam. do you still have a drive for sale?
 








 
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