Compact 8 lathe servo spindle with acorn?

[DICKEYBIRD]

Light cuts, high feeds, high rpm is what I am after.

Do you have your C8 in an enclosure with flood coolant to get rid of the heat & contain the mess? Man I wish I had that on the ORAC. Even at its 1650 rpm (self imposed) max the work gets hot enough to grow a little, depending on the part & code of course. I think 3 grand & up would give me fits. I'm sure my feeds & D.O.C.'s could be more cleverly written to take more heat away in the chips but I'm still a'learnin'!

[frijoli]

Light cuts, high feeds, high rpm is what I am after.

Do you have your C8 in an enclosure with flood coolant to get rid of the heat & contain the mess? Man I wish I had that on the ORAC. Even at its 1650 rpm (self imposed) max the work gets hot enough to grow a little, depending on the part & code of course. I think 3 grand & up would give me fits. I'm sure my feeds & D.O.C.'s could be more cleverly written to take more heat away in the chips but I'm still a'learnin'!

Well I've seen your results, and your learnin' is way ahead of many. My goal with the spindle is to have more than the lathe can handle in speed and power. If I was truly serious about hogging material at high speeds, I wouldn't be converting a Compact 8, lol. It's good but it isn't magical.
The reality is that I want the overhead.

[frijoli]

Two basic questions.
Is it feasible to use a servo motor from the 0-10v signal and a voltage to pulse converter?
Is it possible to use one of the axis to control the spindle?
Thanks in advance.

Clay
Ps. I already Ave a spare servo, but do not have a 3 phase spindle motor or VFD available.

Clay,
It sounds like you are asking for C axis control?
If so, yes C axis control with Acorn is available in the Pro version of the Centroid Lathe CNC12 software.

There are several approaches to this advanced feature.
One cool way to add C axis to a Lathe is to have a regular spindle motor running the spindle as usual and then also create the ability to mechanically engage (and disengage) a servo motor (or stepper motor) to the spindle which then allows the spindle to be run in C axis mode. We have done exactly this on several machines in our shop and it works well. here is a web page showing one of the machines we did this on. and a video at the bottom. http://www.centroidcnc.com/cnc_c_axis_lathe.html

Keith, could you provide a sample of the code for this part? I'd like to see what it looks like so I can figure out how to program it. Intercon doesn't seem to have a function for c axis programming that I can see. I would like to incorporate this into the my post processor tests

http://www.centroidcnc.com/images/caxis-tooling.jpg

Clay