Look what showed up at my shop door yesterday

[olddude]

My son works at a large plant near here and sometimes they scrap the most unbelievable stuff. Everything from stainless steel hardware, nut's, bolts, screws of every size imaginable. I've seen those 20 and 40 foot long scrap bins half full of this hardware that most was still in unopened boxes. One time I saved 6] 316L 10" I beams and 6] 4x6 1/2" thick side wall 316L stainless box tubes that all were 20' long.

One time they were moving most all of their machines to another plant and there was several lathes and milling machines that wouldn't fit on the 7 tractor trailers they had out back to haul them away and before he found out about it they had thrown them in the scrap bins out back. I was so sick when I looked over in that scrap bin that day and saw 2 Bridgeport knee mills, A Mazak 28x80, a Bridge port 23x80 and a Leblond 48x 120 lathe all mangled together. Then in the dumpster next to it were probably 10 or 12 brand new snap on tool boxes that were all about 7' wide and were all loaded with every kind of tooling known to man. Most all this tooling was brand new still in boxes but the plant they were supposed to go to was all tooled up and didn't need it so they put it in the dumpsters. They say it was cheaper to scrap it than it would be to keep it around taking up space.

Any way a couple weeks ago they were talking about throwing out several more machines but some of the higher up guys got the okay and were supposed to take them home. There was 1 Bridgeport milling machine and 2 smaller tool room lathes and a big drill press that was headed for scrap. I wanted one of those lathes bad but my son's boss man took both of them but didn't have room for the big drill press. Another boss was going to get that but found out it was 3 phase and decided not to take it so it finally filtered down to my son and he brought it by yesterday, all 3100 lbs of it. I didn't really have room for it but I moved some stuff around and it's now part of my ever growing family of tools. Now I just got to figure out how to power it.

It's a beautiful working machine that they were using one day and the next day they had to make room for something else. Here's my brand new, well older.....new toy.

 

[Firestopper]

Thats a beauty congratulations!

 

[JimDawson]

WOW !

Sounds like a fun place to go dumpster diving.

 

[Robert LaLonde]

Variable Frequency Drive is the easiest, but you might need some help on setup. Rotary phase converter would of course work, but its less efficient and just provides straight 60hz (or 50 if that's your base frequency) so you can't use it for speed control. The rotary's advantage is you can plug different machines into it. If there are no real electronic controls you might be able to use a static phase converter cheaper. It will run a motor ok. I have VFDs all over my shop and plan to add a couple more.

 

[olddude]

Variable Frequency Drive is the easiest, but you might need some help on setup. Rotary phase converter would of course work, but its less efficient and just provides straight 60hz (or 50 if that's your base frequency) so you can't use it for speed control. The rotary's advantage is you can plug different machines into it. If there are no real electronic controls you might be able to use a static phase converter cheaper. It will run a motor ok. I have VFDs all over my shop and plan to add a couple more.

Yeah, that will be the next step and I have been doing a little reading on different ways to power this thing. I was lucky with my Bridgeport mill it's single phase. That does a good job on most stuff I do but larger holes, stuff over 11/4" can be a pain. This thing will drill pretty much what ever size bit you have and the tables are a lot more adjustable when you want to drill odd sized stuff. The small table on the Bridgeport doesn't work to well if you have a bunch of holes in a long piece of work there just isn't enough travel, maybe 20" at best without having to set up again and we all know how that works out.

Right now I have to put this on the back burner because money is tight. Once I finally finish my building the way I want I'll look into getting power to this machine. When you say you can't use a rotary phase converter for speed, just what do you mean by that? This machine has a 3 HP 50hz motor on it so what do I need to look for.

 

[Chipper5783]

"When you say you can't use a rotary phase converter for speed, just what do you mean by that? This machine has a 3 HP 50hz motor on it so what do I need to look for."

Just means you can't use the RPC for speed control. Of course you get the 9 speeds provided by the speed selections on the machine, and ease of plugging in other 3 phase machines (with the capacity and voltage of the RPC and your supply).

"What do you need?" What is written on the motor name plate? That is your starting point.

 

[olddude]

WOW !

Sounds like a fun place to go dumpster diving.

You got that right, I would give my whole right n........well you know what I mean, if I could get their scrap contract. I was thinking it would be worth investing in a couple of those big dumpsters and a truck to haul them on. Then of course you would have to have a warehouse to sort all that good stuff out then scrap the rest. They scrap between 1 and 2 hundred thousand pounds of SS a year and almost that much of other exotic type medals, aluminum, inconel, titanium, copper, toungsten among others. Heck I would be happy with just the scrap iron they scrap out every year.

One time I saw them pay a rigging company $80,000 to dismantle and haul away a 50 ton travel crane because it was 5 years old. Then paid them over $100,000 to install another one just like it and that was just the labor. Oh, and the rigging company got the old equipment for hauling it off. The sad part was in the 5 years the old equipment was in service they only used it like about 4 times because they didn't have anyone on staff that was qualified to use it. Every time the did use it they had to hire a crew from some rigging company to come in to make the lift to the tune of about $ 10,000 a pop. I guess when you are making a tone of money you have to find write offs to keep uncle sam at bay. LOL

 

[olddude]

"When you say you can't use a rotary phase converter for speed, just what do you mean by that? This machine has a 3 HP 50hz motor on it so what do I need to look for."

Just means you can't use the RPC for speed control. Of course you get the 9 speeds provided by the speed selections on the machine, and ease of plugging in other 3 phase machines (with the capacity and voltage of the RPC and your supply).

"What do you need?" What is written on the motor name plate? That is your starting point.

That's what I thought you meant. As noted before it is a 50hz 3 horse power motor that runs on 220/440 v. I think it runs at 1750rpms i'll have to look at the plate again. It's a Westinghouse Life-Line, type CSP motor if that means anything to you.

 

[dlane]

What ever company that is there, way to wasteful.
They must be making things for the government wasting our tax dollars .
Unfortunately there are too many gov contract companies like that.
But I'm sure they rite off there wast and don't really pay for it, we do !.

 

[Robert LaLonde]

Right now I have to put this on the back burner because money is tight. Once I finally finish my building the way I want I'll look into getting power to this machine. When you say you can't use a rotary phase converter for speed, just what do you mean by that? This machine has a 3 HP 50hz motor on it so what do I need to look for.

You can run that motor on 50hz or 60hz. No problem there. The speed will just be a little different. Either about 600 RPM or 300 RPM difference depending on the pole count of the motor. A rotary phase converter uses a motor, caps and a few other little things to turn single phase into three phase, but the frequency in is the frequency out. If you have 60hz in you get 60hz out, and that determines the speed of your motor. A VFD (depending on the model) can provide from a fraction of a cycle upto 1000hz. (maybe more?) They can be controlled by an external signal source, programming, or a simple POT depending on the features of that particular. Most 3phase motors at reasonable loads can be speed controlled by frequency from about half speed to about double speed with little or no ill affect. The problem at lower speeds is most motors have an internal fan for cooling that fails to move enough air when its turning slow. The motor simply may not have good enough bearings or be well enough balance for higher speeds. Sometimes you can overcome the heat dissipation issues of low speed operation by installing an external fan that continuously blows air through the motor at full speed regardless of spindle motor speed.

VFDs have the secondary benefit that at about 60-70% of their rating most can use a single phase input and produce a 3 phase output. There are just a few that are full rating with single phase input, but they will be advertised as such. If it doesn't say it then assume you need to derate it by about 30-40%.

For example: On my Hurco KMB1 it runs from 96 RPM at 3hz to 3600 RPM at 120hz. Its controlled by a VFD that uses a 0-10VDC signal from the CNC controller. The motor actually originally came as two motors. Inside the case of the motor is a second motor that just drives a fan. On my little high speed mills they have spindles that turn upto 24,000 RPM at 400hz. I am running single phase input to the VFD.

An aside note: Often on small to medium size drill presses guys switch out the single phase motor for a 3 phase motor with a VFD that is either POT controlled or front panel programming controlled so that they can vary speed more easily with fewer belt changes.

Interesting factoid: Upto about 1HP there are some name brand VFDs that will also allow you tun run 230V motors with a single phase 120V input. There are some Chinese VFDs that claim to be able to handle higher HP in this circumstance, but I don't trust them.