I just burned up my spindle after trying to adjust the settings on the VFD. No real indicators other than the spindle wouldn’t rotate like it had then came to the smoke.
I just ordered my replacement. Another Homer Simpson moment.
D’oh! bummer bud…
That’s weird… it’s just an electric motor. What kind of adjustments caused that?
I have the same setup and it’s hard to think of anything I could do that would elicit the majick smoke…
@Mike_Thornbury It was odd b/c most settings I entered were lower than what was on it originally: it had 400 Hz input and I changed it to 60 b/c a video said that in the United States the frequency was 60, outside the US it’s 50. I lowered the amps to 7 from 11. The video had acceleration/deceleration at 2 seconds, the VFD had 20 seconds, I changed it to 7 seconds (that may have been the problem). The VFD had 11 amps, I lowered it to 4 (Guy on video-Russ Stuff- had it set at 3.2). Voltages were about the same as default-220v. That was about it.
That is strange. I haven’t changed anything from the defaults, but we are at 50hz here. Maybe check with the vendor rather than someone on the internet and see what they recommend?
@Mike_Thornbury yes, I did that. I’m trying to learn my lessons.
And, everything else was working better than ever. My main issues at this time was trying to figure out Mach3 to do something other than cut a circle. I haven’t gotten anything to work as a .tap file.
Just a guess but that 400hz is the frequency that the VFD is generating not your line frequency. Setting it that low may have caused the windings to overheat
@George_Allen this May help on BOB Mach 3 and VFD: https://en.industryarena.com/forum/mach3-sunfar-vfd-chinese-5-axis-bob--337046.html
@Stephen_Pinn That was the Problem I believe, as that was a setting that the manufacturer told me to enter. I didn’t see anything about that on the first video I watched from Russ Stuff. I don’t know if I accidentally entered into the wrong program or if it was different from the model on the video or what.
@Mike_Thornbury I have switched my BOB. I’m no longer using the ST-V2.
What smoked, the spindle or the VFD?
@Alex_Paverman spindle
I ‘smoked’ myself the VFD, a year ago… A ‘short’! Hopefuly It could be fixed by an electronist. You should be careful with the settngs. Make one at a time and make small variations. Myself I kept the most of the original ones. I don’t think you realy need such an abrupt acceleration.
Yeah, 400Hz is the right setting. That’s not a power input setting, it’s specific the motor wiring configuration. I’ve heard stories about killing spindles by getting that wrong. Definitely some good videos out there walking through the key setup parameters. Once I got it going I don’t touch them anymore.
What’s a .tap file?
@Paul_Frederick That is what Mach uses apparently.
.tap is just a file extension. The file itself is standard plain text gcode file. Mach doesn’t care what the file extension is as long as it is standard gcode text.
I personally like to name my gcode files with the .nc extension
@Jim_Fong yeah I use ngc