Kitamura mycenter 1 pallet Chin Loc alarm

Hey everyone,

I have a late 90's mycenter 1 pallet VMC. I dont use the pallet change option on this machine due to its location in the shop(poor planning before my time)

anyway i have had this alarm pop up twice before and i unfortunately was out both times it got fixed.
I know its a sensor or switch somewhere but i cant remember what the repair tech had done.

the alarm seems to come and go at the worst possible times...i just turned it back on and its gone! but i still would like to know if anybody else has this issue.

Im pretty confidant with these machines and fixing the small stuff by myself.

still having this issue, anybody have a solution?

thanks

If it is anything like the mycenter 3 we had (1993 vintage), the pallet changer is operated by a chain and ram attached to the x axis.

When the table lifts, so does a "finger" on a cylinder (either air or hydraulic, ours was air) that locks into a slotted block on the chain.

If the finger doesn't fit into the chain, it will sit there and throw an alarm.

There are sensors on the cylinder itself. Either the cylinder has not stroked fully, or a sensor is faulty. Similarly, there might be chips in the area, so the sensors might be working properly but one of them might be activated by the chips, meaning the machine thinks the cylinder is both fully up and fully down.

The cylinder I am talking about is in the front of the machine, attached to the x axis table, a bit to the right of center.

I suppose it is possible that your machine is different but I doubt it. Will hopefully be a similar design.


We recently scrapped our machine. A part of the reason was the pallet changer sucked to use if you didn't use it frequently. The thing has too many chip traps.

im going to pull the x axis cover and clean it out