I just bought a new old lathe, as an upgrade to the Cheap Chinese Lathe. The new lathe actually has a smaller between-centres distance than the CCL, only 1" more swing, but weighs about 12x as much.
The drive-train is a 900 rpm motor, then a Kopp Variator, and then a 2-speed electrically-actuated gearbox. I am trying to decide whether to control spindle speed by setting up a motor to twiddle the speed adjustment of the variator and leave the VFD (which I need to synthesise 3-phase) at a fixed frequency, or whether to leave the variator at a fixed setting and control speed with the VFD. The advantage of the variator is that as you reduce the speed there is more torque available, but that is not the case with a VFD. I suppose an alternative would be to swap the motor for a 240V single-phase item and not have a VFD at all. The drive-train can be seen in this photo: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/bXi9y-7WGDJSi8r0Rhr6XH69jlxvlrTD6CexboMrrBE?feat=directlink It is fairly substantial. -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
