Paint? Color?

A little back story:

When I was instructor at the SAR school, I used to ask my students if it was better to be good or lucky. I’d get all sorts of answers, but my point was always to be aspire to be “good”, because lucky is something that may or may not be there. I always used to close that out with “I have to be good because I have no luck at all”.

Well, the lathe burning out pots on me just proved that once again.

I pulled the entire schmozzle out of the kathe today and started tracing wires, testing electronics and verifying it all against the wiring/engineering drawings.

Turns out, even though I was meticulous (or so I thought) at labeling every single wire before I took it apart for painting, I somehow missed that I had three 6’s on the wire ends.

chasing it down, I had managed to hook one of the pots legs to the mains. Yep, that will smoke a few pots for sure.

So, I was not “good” when I labeled them, I was “unlucky” when I reconnected them and I was even more “unlucky” when I let the smoke out.

Lets hope my “unluckiness” doesn’t hold and the board is still good…

Can’t win for loosing….
 
It sucks to make errors like that (plenty of experience in that respect) but the good news is that you found the issue and can move forward. Hopefully with a little bit of improvement in the "Attention to Detail" skill :)
 
Ah, figured out what went wrong.

When is a 6 not a 6? When its a 9….:chagrin:

Everything was actually labeled correctly.

the problem I actually had was my poor hand writing.

Apparently, my “6” and my “9” are hard to distinguish from each other, even if it is my own handwriting.

Soooooo…you can probably figure out what followed after I “reconnected” everything…..”poof”!

If only I had thought to put a line under the 6 or the 9…ugh.

Ah well, C’est la vie!

I guess a silver lining is the speed control will have a brand new potentiometer instead of the 20-year old one that went…..poof!

:)
 
Last edited:
So…. Working now?? Or waiting on parts?
 
Success!

Finished tracing out all the wiring for the controller and slaved in a temporary 20K pot. It hurts nothing to use a larger value pot , although it will come out when the right ones show up this Friday.

It wasn't all bad though. Having to pull it all out and redo it gave me the opportunity to clean up my wiring and fix a few things that I initially did that have bugged me for a while (ie; wire colors, routing, labeling, etc).

Now the controller looks nice and neat in it's little cubby:

fr_3834.jpg

At this point, the lathe is essentially back together. I just need to to some final adjustments/alignments and lube all the things that need lube.

I'll be throwing chips again soon!

:)

On a side note: I had to drop into a stereo store that has an older serv dept in order to get a couple 240v 1a slow blow fuses. While I was there I had a conversation with the tech. I told him I've got a Sansui 8080DB that I'm recapping and have to balance the outputs. I can do electronics, but it's not my favorite thing and I'm pretty rudimentary with it. Honestly, I tend to avoid it if I can. He told me to bring it in and he can probably finish it up for my for around 4-50 bucks.

Seems pretty affordable and it woudl be done a lot sooner than if I wait for me to get back to it. So I'll probably drop it off tomorrow and let them go at it....
 
Last edited:
New danfoss pot showed up today and I installed it right away. Works perfectly.

Control panel is now buttoned up and ready to go. Only thing I have left to sort is the min speed (new pot, slightly different values) as it doesn't move until the knob is at 10%. It's just a simple turn on a pot on the pcb itself.

I'm also considering 3d printing the transposing gear and the reversing gearbox gear. My current zamak ones are fine, they just make a lot of noise. Not horrible, but not quiet either. Adding a few gears in abs should quiet the gear trains down a lot and I can always print more if I break them. We'll see how well they work (or not)
 
Last edited:
I like how everything looks.

I might copy the backsplash idea… that also came out great.
 
Well, proof of concept successful!


DFB35553-A47E-4C3C-898F-05C2174D521F.jpeg


Cleaned it up, reamed the bore to size and popped it into the gear train.

Pretty much all the gear “ring” is gone!

I won’t call it quiet, but the noise level is so low I almost feel guilty calling it noise.

It’s such a good fit, I’m going to run it to failure to see where the failure happens. I suspect it will be in the pin bore where it sees the most friction. I did run it up to 1200 rpm and no abs melting or other issues were apparent. There were a few abs “shavings”, but thats likely just the abs gear bedding in/mating with the zamak gears.

quick vid for the sound it now makes:


That's pretty quiet for an Atlas 10!


Next up: reversing gearbox.


:)
 
Back
Top