Folks,
A while ago, I read through the whole adventure of one Thomas Utley on building a fancy control panel for his old South Bend 16" lathe. He put more work into that than I intend to, between the fancy diesel tachometer for the lathe, the expensive custom cast iron housing for all of it and such, but I was quite impressed with a few things. First of all, he made sure that all the wiring was logically laid out and carefully arranged. Second of all, he put in proper e-Stops in a couple of places.
I've also seen power interlocks for lathes, similar to a micrometer carriage stop, that when you ran into it, would kill power to the machine, preventing you from being able to run into the chuck. Similar arrangements could be envisioned for a mill with a powerfeed. Unfortunately, the article I read on that in an antique issue of Popular Mechanics, and as I saw implemented on a Logan 200 I looked at once, were for small lathes with 1/2 HP motors that had fairly low maximum current draw.
My confusion/problem/issue is that both my lathe and mill are 2 HP machines with single phase motors, so all of the tricks of wiring these safety mechanisms into them that I've read online using the accessory features of a VFD don't really apply to me... How could I install an interlock on my lathe or an e-Stop on either machine in my existing single phase setup without breaking the bank? Do you guys have any other useful/smart/easy-to-implement safety switches/interlocks on your machines?
Thanks,
Will
A while ago, I read through the whole adventure of one Thomas Utley on building a fancy control panel for his old South Bend 16" lathe. He put more work into that than I intend to, between the fancy diesel tachometer for the lathe, the expensive custom cast iron housing for all of it and such, but I was quite impressed with a few things. First of all, he made sure that all the wiring was logically laid out and carefully arranged. Second of all, he put in proper e-Stops in a couple of places.
I've also seen power interlocks for lathes, similar to a micrometer carriage stop, that when you ran into it, would kill power to the machine, preventing you from being able to run into the chuck. Similar arrangements could be envisioned for a mill with a powerfeed. Unfortunately, the article I read on that in an antique issue of Popular Mechanics, and as I saw implemented on a Logan 200 I looked at once, were for small lathes with 1/2 HP motors that had fairly low maximum current draw.
My confusion/problem/issue is that both my lathe and mill are 2 HP machines with single phase motors, so all of the tricks of wiring these safety mechanisms into them that I've read online using the accessory features of a VFD don't really apply to me... How could I install an interlock on my lathe or an e-Stop on either machine in my existing single phase setup without breaking the bank? Do you guys have any other useful/smart/easy-to-implement safety switches/interlocks on your machines?
Thanks,
Will