Your channel doesn’t get the credit it’s due. Your camera work is better than a lot of big channels. Keep grinding! You will be a 100k sub account before long.
a vfd can only run one single motor. it does not provide 3 phase electricity. your best cheapest bet is to build yourself a rotary phase converter out of an old 3 phase motor and some capacitors. that will get you the power you need to run a mill like that. To use vfd you would need a seperate vfd for each motor in the mill and rewire the controls to talk to the low voltage side of the vfds to control the motors.
Yep, I enjoyed watching that. With the hours you put into it was was a loss but I was glad to see someone found a use for it so it’s wasn’t a waste. Cheers mate, Stuart 🇦🇺
Production mills. Great for 100's and 1000's of repetitive milling operations. Mostly useless in a hobby or general job shop. Hundreds of them have been scrapped in the past 30-40 years.
When I first got started with my shop I found a pair of old Kent Owens small production horizontal mills just like the Sunstrand. I knew it was obsolete and I never intended to use it as a mill, but after doing some part swapping and getting creative I made the smaller Kent Owens into the best damn tube notcher ever. It is a small compact machine with a 40 taper spindle, I made some custom tooling for it to hold the tube and cutters. It makes the most accurate tube notches and it cost me some time and a little bit of money. If you do fabrication and have the space see if you can convert one of the machines, it is worth it.
Now that's a great idea. These would make killer tubing notchers what with the automatic feed and being as rigid and powerful as they are. Unfortunately tube notching is one thing I just never find myself needing to do.
I remember my brother bought an old World War II gear harbor. It was a gigantic machine. He eventually got it going, but the mathematics on it took them a year to learn. I love your videos cool.
Yeah we're fortunate to have a glut of old milling machines around here. If it had been a regular toolroom style machine it would have been worth considerably more but still probably not $2000.
I have just been in the very same situation. Having very good high quality older machines, that were very expensive, years ago. That no one wanted..... Ended up being scrapped. Those VFD's typically put out square waves, VS a sign wave. I've never had any problems with running old motors as long as it is set up correctly. As for using a motor to generator a 3rd phase, this is not fool proof ether. That phase that is generated is lower in voltage because of losses. This will eventally over heat the motor your running. Better off with a VFD, that is set up correctly.
Yes it's terrible the things that go to waste due to obsolescence. I was under the impression that if you use a big enough motor for the idler the voltage difference will be negligible. Now I wish I had measured the voltage on each leg going into the mill. It's also interesting that you haven't had any trouble using a VFD on old equipment. I've read lots of stories of people attributing a motor failures to the square wave output but idk. I have used them successfully on some newer stuff.
@@AlwaysBored123 The issue is older motors with class b insulation is not rated for the high voltage spikes a VFD creates during pulse width modulation. That really is not an issue tho if you are not abusing the VFD to get higher frequency out of the motor than it was designed for. The other issue is using the VFD to control the motor speed which normally is done through gear ratios but if done with a VFD you are effecting its ability to cool itself.
@@inkman996 That's very interesting. It is extremely tempting to reduce the motor speed with a VFD on most machine tools so that could explain most of the problems people have with them.
I have put so many of those machines in a scrap yard that it hurts. But they are obsolite, and no one wants them. They sit for sale for years, then people just want them gone.
Yep. It's terrible what progress leaves in it's wake sometimes. What kills me is when everyone eventually decides they want the old junk back and suddenly the few examples that weren't thrown out are priceless.
Oh no worries I'm just fine. Unfortunately I've been working a regular job driving a truck a lot lately and have been neglecting more important things. I do have a few videos in the works though just need to finish them up. Thanks for checking on me though that's very kind.
Amazing old machines, forefathers of today’s CNC machines, except ! Everything is mechanical. The people who designed these machines were geniuses, not like today’s machines where everything is controlled electronically by a computer.
It is really neat the way they're designed. And a real testament to the designers that they were both still working fine some 70ish years later with apparently next to no maintenance.
