Hardinge CNC Lathe Spindle Won't Activate ??? HELP PLEASE

glbreil said:

I suppose you have the collet closed?

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Dualkit said:

Did you try a higher speed? Don't know of your controller, but I have had some that won't run anything under 300 rpm.

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Italiano83 said:

When I open up the electrical cabinet all drives and power units show green lights and no errors. The only difference I notice is that there is a Magnetek 505 speed controller that shows 0.0 on the digital display when machine is at idle. Lets then say a execute spindle motion at 200 rpm. At that point, it will toggle slightly between 6.9/7.0 like its trying to maintain a speed. But again, no spindle movement.

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Perry Harrington said:

That 505 has a lot of diagnostics and stuff built into it. Go run the VFD at the panel and see if it spins the motor.

Get the manual for the VFD and mess with it to see if that VFD died.

I've heard a lot of 505's needing repair, so it may just be its time to be fixed.

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Italiano83 said:

We bought a Hardinge Cobra 42 (1998 model) about a year ago as a backup machine. I'm now trying to get it setup and cant seem to get the spindle motion to activate. No alarms or errors are present. Axis Motion works fine. If I execute in MDI an "M03 S200" no motion happens, but I get a "*** fin" to popup on the bottom of the display. Someone told me that its looking for a finish signal (whatever that is). I know it is reading in the M03 because if I go to the ladder all items connected to M03 are highlighted. Same works for M04. I also can execute M13 (or M14) and it will turn the coolant on but again, no spindle movement. When I open up the electrical cabinet all drives and power units show green lights and no errors. The only difference I notice is that there is a Magnetek 505 speed controller that shows 0.0 on the digital display when machine is at idle. Lets then say a execute spindle motion at 200 rpm. At that point, it will toggle slightly between 6.9/7.0 like its trying to maintain a speed. But again, no spindle movement.

One last thing...when I go to diagnostics, all bits next to all items are "0", except for 3 items which show "1":

021 Reset Button On
024 Reset On
025 Stop Motion or Dwell


Any Ideas?? This is getting super annoying.

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StickShifter said:

I know this is an old thread but I am also dealing with it.

The best I can tell is the the input circuit in the GPD505 is bad. According to the manual, the four main control lines are active low and should be at +24V when not activated. You can confirm if this is the problem with your drive. There are four wires that are red, yellow, blue and ?? that go up to the relay bank at the top right of the power cabinet. The red is the FORWARD RUN line. There is a gray wire with a shorting bar just above those four wires. Use a volt meter to measure the voltage between those four wires and the gray wire. Mine are all at 0v. And that is a problem. The relays to the left of those wires are controlled by the Fanuc controller to activate the spindle drive. They just make the connection between the four control wires and the gray ground wire.

The Fanuc controller appears to not have enough capability to fault out that the spindle is not running. It just sits there with the actual speed display at 0rpm. The rest of the machine functions as it should and the spindle controller works fine in manual mode. I took my controller apart but had no success. I am a retired electronics design engineer but it is very tough to trouble shoot a piece of hardware with zero documentation.

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erd39030 said:

I got the same problem.
It ended up being the 3 phase power lines being in the wrong sequence. Just swapping 2 of the phases solved the issue.

Of course it took me half a day to figure it out.

In this Cobra there is a 3 phase monitoring relay, brand Carlo Gavazzi, which open the circuit of 2 wires 25CBL when phases are out of sequence or a phase is down.
The relay has 2 LEDs: A green one indicating it has power and an orange one when the relay is activated.

So the phases were wrong, the relay didn't close, the spindle never received the "run" signal between pin S1 & SC (or S2 & SC) although it received the speed reference voltage so it showed "the speed", and the control remained frozen in "start" mode (green start button ON) without never finishing the M03 command, no alarm.

In this case it was a phase problem. A faulty relay might be the problem in other cases.

Hope this help somebody in the future.

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erd39030 said:

I got the same problem.
It ended up being the 3 phase power lines being in the wrong sequence. Just swapping 2 of the phases solved the issue.

Of course it took me half a day to figure it out.

In this Cobra there is a 3 phase monitoring relay, brand Carlo Gavazzi, which open the circuit of 2 wires 25CBL when phases are out of sequence or a phase is down.
The relay has 2 LEDs: A green one indicating it has power and an orange one when the relay is activated.

So the phases were wrong, the relay didn't close, the spindle never received the "run" signal between pin S1 & SC (or S2 & SC) although it received the speed reference voltage so it showed "the speed", and the control remained frozen in "start" mode (green start button ON) without never finishing the M03 command, no alarm.

In this case it was a phase problem. A faulty relay might be the problem in other cases.

Hope this help somebody in the future.

Click to expand...