Futaba DRO

AviatorDave said:

The used bridgeport I bought a few weeks ago has a Futaba Pulscale CJ2004 DRO on it. Anyone have anything that resembles a manual for it?

It will turn on, and increment when I move the table, but the values are way off. When in inch mode, it goes out to 6 decimal places, but one full turn of the handle only increases the value .040".

I've tried it in absolute mode, incremental mode, everything. There are some buttons that are unreadable, however. I tried to see if any of them made a difference, but none do.

Powering it off, unplugging, and R&R the battery doesn't fix it either.

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piniongear said:

I have no manual but it sounds like your problem may be that the encoders are not set correctly and as a result the travel is not reading out correctly.
Today I had this problem on my newly installed DRO (Acu-Rite). I turned the handles of the Bridgeport and the readout said the table moved .650 inches (5/8 inch approx) but I had clearly moved the table several inches.
A call to Acu-Rite solved the problem. Turns out I had set the encoder at .5 UM and it should have been set to 5.0 um. (Don't even ask me what the heck um means) After the correct setting was entered, one inch on the meter was inch on the table movement.
This may not help you at all, but on my DRO the encoder set up is listed under 'Installation Install' and then under 'Encoder Settings'.
So, try to check what your encoders are set at. Google Futaba and see if you can get a lead on where you can call for customer service if you cannot find where/how to check the settings..........pg

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AviatorDave said:

The guy I bought the machine from is sending me another Futaba DRO box, which should use the same scales, but even if it works, I still won't have a manual. It is a slightly newer model, a CJX201 he told me. Hopefully it will just work as I don't want to fork out another $1k for another DRO system.

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AviatorDave said:

Well crap. I got the replacement DRO box. It's a newer model, but with basic functions, not hole patterns and the like, which is fine with me.

But I hooked it up to the scales and it does the exact same thing - .2" of table travel = .040" of screen increment. It's counting 5x too slow. I took the cover off of one of the scale read heads only to find 5 pot screws.

I have no idea where to go from here besides shelling out a chunk of change for a new DRO system.

Damn.

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piniongear said:

Can you read the button functions better on the newer one? I recall you said there are some buttons that are 'unreadable' on the older head.
If so, what you want to do is get access to the 'Set up' function and then find the encoder settings. See what it is set at. You will want to set them at a 'courser setting'........pg

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AviatorDave said:

That's the problem - no manual, and there's no button labeled 'setup'. But no matter, I figured it out what caused the problem on the old box, and got the new one working.

I took the newer box apart and found 4 banks of 8-pole dip switches. X1 and Y1 were all off. X2 and Y2 had 2, 4, 6, and 7 all on. So I started randomly changing dip switches. I first got it to go to .400" with .2" travel, so knew I was on the right trail. After a few more tries, I got it to work perfect.

This let me understand why the original box didn't work - on the back it said "Replace battery at least once every 6 months." There was a battery compartment on the side with 2 AA batteries. I took out the old crusty corroded ones and put in 2 new ones when I was originally troubleshooting it. So I'm sure that those batteries were deader than door nails, and when they unplugged it to ship it, it lost the setup parameters.

But I'm good to go. I just wish now that the old box's button pad wasn't so screwed up as it had some nice features, like a connector for a zero-set probe, bolt circle patterns, etc. No matter, I can do all that on a PC anyways.

But thanks for your help.

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