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A place to compile repair guides for CNC machines

smartcolombyan

Plastic
Joined
Dec 24, 2020
For all the brave souls who have ventured into purchasing cheap old CNC machines and found the support sporadic at best.. let’s pour our combined knowledge to keep those old spindles turning.

I found a great website: repair.wiki which is a great place people posted guides to fix consumer electronics and figured we could add a CNC machine repair section too.

I’ve figured out some things in my journey of self repair and hope others take the time to share their knowledge: Matsuura 1998 MC 510-VG - Repair Preservation Group

What do you guys think?
 
It is a noble idea, that is for sure. But there are so many CNC and manual machines, that this thread would be miles long. I am going to have to rebuild the cylinder for the tool changer on a Tree mill with dynapath delta 40 controller that was installed Feb of 1996 (I lovingly call it the dynasaur). This is after having the e-stop randomly activate, shutting down the cnc controller. My shop hired a farmer who is self taught electrical, and for a week we were checking this and that. Turns out there was a small ripple on the 5 volt part of the power source. I am no electrical guy, my philosophy is to avoid electrical work, sorry if my explanation is sub par. Instead of paying another $800 for a refurb power source, we installed a transistor or something of that nature to quiet the ripple and make sure the 5 volts don't dip below 5 and trip the watchdog alarm. We also reseated all the cards in the back. Between the two the e stop hasn't been tripped in a couple weeks.Knocking on every piece of wood near me and sprinkling salt and holy water for good measure. Once the tool changer is fixed, we will wait to see what else I can break on the machine.
 
I guess it couldn’t hurt to have some redundancy and maybe keeping a copy on the wiki. I’m all for the right to repair and the knowledge should just be preserved as much as possible. But you’re right the repair guides might actually get looked at here as opposed to people trying to fix their laptop or phone.
 
I don’t think it’s a problem being miles long, wikis are considered success stories if a topic takes off and starts being populated exponentially. All that matters is if it’s good useful content and people find it useful and all in one place. Memory storage is only getting cheaper.
 
Turns out there was a small ripple on the 5 volt part of the power source. I am no electrical guy, my philosophy is to avoid electrical work, sorry if my explanation is sub par.

I suggest when you have spare time, take out the switching power supply and check out the internals visually. Capacitors most likely are starting to leak (or bulge) and it can lead to catastrophic damage (unrepairable) in the power supply.
 








 
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