Trying This Again

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papermaker

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I have a Bridgeport clone with a Southwestern Industries CNC retrofit circa 1985. I has servo motors on all 3 axes. All three servo motors work as I can jog the X,Y and Z. You write your program using a digital pendant that takes you through programing the job. I keep getting alarm messages such as "Y" TOO MUCH TILT or nother one is SOFT LIMIT EXCEEDED.

Not having a manuals or experience makes diagnosing these faults impossible.

I know that the servo motors are good as are the encoders on all three axis.

My questions are 1. do these messages have a universal meaning with all CNC 2. Has anyone had experience with SWI TRAK CNC 3. can I use some of the existing components to connect this to a PC / software package.


Short of that it is useful as a DRO but it takes up a lot of real estate .
 
I spoke with SWI about getting a copy of the manual. They said that they are no longer available. They told me that my machine dates back to 1985. He said frankly that he was surprized that it still worked which I can't verify that it does. I can verify that the servo motors work as it will jog in all 3 axis. I inquire about updating the controls thinking that the biggest part of the whole system still worked.
On the bright side I spoke with a technician from Profusion, a company that makes stepper kits for mini mills like the Harbor frieght kits and he indicated that for very little money it can be converted to run off mach3 software thru a PC. Seemed real eager to help which is more than iI can say for SWI.
 
Sounds like you are tripping limit switches (well, not sure about the "tilt" error). I don't know much about the particular control, but there might not be anything wrong (user error, which is where the manual would help), or you could have a loose wire to the limit switches. Can you locate the limit switches?

If you don't have limit switches (it's possible) the machine doesn't really know where it is until you tell it. Before I added limit switches, LinuxCNC gave similar errors if I homed it, and then tried to move too far in one direction or another. Not knowing much about your control, I can only guess based on other things I have seen; some things to explore at least.

If the motors are good, you probably just need a PC and some motor drivers to switch it over to Mach or LinuxCNC. If you can figure out how to get a pulse output from your computer to the existing drivers, you probably just need a computer.
 
I spent about 3 hours yesterday sitting on the garage floor looking through electrical prints trying to identify what each part in the cabinet is and what function it does. I was looking to see what drives the servo motors and I think I have it narrowed down to what I think are the drive cards for each axis. I'm not sure if pictures of the inside of the cabinet and its components would help in indentify the parts.. I'll post so anyway.
As far I can tell (by the prints) limit switches were an option.
 
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