Wiring up

The plastic conduit for the head connections is a nice fit in the hole in the side of the head. That's one of those handy coincidences that makes life easier, although the plastic cable gland doesn't have enough thread to allow the nut to fit on the inside once it's been poked through the hole. However, a quick look shows that I can machine down a fair bit of the body without losing any significant strength or function. Sounds like a job for the lathe.

Hadn't connected the lathe up yet, although I'd managed to locate all of the tooling and (crucially) the VFD. The machine itself is looking a bit sorry, after several months under canvas but otherwise outside over Winter. It's not completely buggered but there's a fair bit of mostly superficial rust. Anyway, it all went together OK and worked fine.

Previously the VFD was mounted on the wall behind the machine. Now it's at 90 degrees to the wall , so there's nothing convenient to mount it on. I don't have much raw material - not even The Brown Stuff, as you are not allowed to export wood from Canada unless it's specially certified, so I had to leave it all behind and there's very little left over from the building work. Upshot is, I hung it on the back of the machine. I can still vary the speed with the pendant but can't see what the indicated speed is.

Came out very well. And with the Z axis wiring fed through, there is still plenty of room in the conduit for other stuff like the spindle gear selection microswitches and the Z axis limit switches. I have a reel of Cat5 (Ethernet) cable, so that was used for these circuits. I need 3 (including 0V) for the range switches and 5 (including 0V) for the limit switches, so 8-core Cat5 cable is ideal. It doesn't need to be screened and doesn't need to be flexible, as neither end will be moving.

The little things seem to take longest. So things ground to a halt when I tried to find some 1/4" female spade connectors to terminate the microswitch connections. I know I have a bucket or Linbin full of them somewhere but gave up looking after half an hour. Will have to actually buy some which is annoying. Wasn't a complete waste of time though. In the process of rummaging, I found all sorts of otherwise useful stuff like fuses and fuseholders, switches, more machine screws, loads of clinchnuts (threaded inserts that are fitted rather like pop rivets), a 60A Semikron bridge rectumfrier (nice big beefy thing with screw terminals), quite a few 4mm banana plugs and flying leads, a giant Rifa electrolytic (could have done with that last week) and a few other odds and sods.

I also drilled out the holes in the diecast junction box for the 3 conduit cable glands and fitted the 3 conduits. Looks good. Still need a couple of holes for the X and Y limit switches, the VFD signals (I will mount the VFD next to the spindle motor on the head) etc. I have some QMax punches somewhere but they haven't turned up otherwise they would be useful right now.