Good job troubleshooting, those motor leads look like they've been through the wringer. You learned the hard way why we don't use ball-end allen keys, they either break or strip out due to the relatively small engagement area.
Drive with ball, tighten with straight. Ball drive are great for awkward angles and hard to reach areas, but NEVER torque hard with them. I don't care who the manufacturer is, I have broken Snap-On, Allen, and Wira. I have had to weld little bits on several others to help pull the ball out.
the haas manual for the error codes that directly point to the encoder, the servo connectors are back probe-able for a testing procedure that's also in the manual
I would consider getting some strain relief for those cables, this is waiting until the connector does break at the servo side. In the future you could save yourself some time and measure the phase resistance of the motor, all 3 phases should measure the same. Another thing that could have helped was looking if the encoder position changed when you turned the motor by hand (not 100% sure that works/is safe on this machine). Good job finding the error without ordering needless parts.
Good Job At a previous employer that used lots of allen bolts/screws. It was not uncommon to break the balls off of allen wrenches. Big note is do not use the ball end to break loose fasteners. Use them as easy turning tools. The best thing we found for the broken balls was to hit with a punch to knock it loose in the socket of the bolt/screw and then do as necessary to remove loose ball. Strong Magnets work well. You did well.
Two important takeaways here: 1.) Always have Mountain Dew or other sufficiently caffeinated beverage on hand when embarking on any troubleshooting adventure, and 2.) if at all possible, have spares for critical components on the shelf so you can get the deliverables out the door and troubleshoot when there's less time pressure. Of course, #2 is limited by what you can afford and isn't always an option, but I've seen folks end up having to pay contract penalties or lose work because something like this happened and they just hadn't considered the possibility. In the past I've bought known bad components (power supplies in particular) for a song and fixed them just so that I have an extra available if needed.
I have some tips for you the servo motor encoder doesn't communicate with the controller directly but it goes true the servo drive. One good thing about older machinery like that haas is that some of there machines use simple pulse/direction controller's to control the motion of the servo drive. So if you ever get to a point where the drive or the servo quits on you, you can buy a modern servo drive and motor for much cheaper and just wire that up to the existing controller. Only draw back is you would need to tune it , this isn't very scary with new drives as they usually come with tuning software packaged in the price.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my experience with various machines, it’s that HAAS more than makes up for your initial savings in parts and repair lol
At VoTech we had a Haas mini mill that stopped homing, turned out there was a chip which had found it's way under the accordion slides and was sitting on top of the magnetic proximity switch which told the machine it was always at home. It probably got there when the machine was cleaned with compressed air.
this quote is awesome: "for the record, I don't know what I'm doing. I've never done this before. The first step of troubleshooting is just getting over yourself and trying to figure it out. By nature if you're troubleshooting, it means you don't know what the problem is, or what you're doing. So don't be afraid to try to fix things."
Good job digging in and finding the issue under the gun like that Any time you get a position error like that there's a high probability that it's going to be encoder related. You saw it as you pulled it apart - they have a little pancake rotary encoder on the back of the motor shaft that keeps track of its position. The stationary side of it will have an optical or magnetic readhead, and there will be a thin disc with engraved or etched graduation marks on it that moves with the shaft. As it spins, it counts those little graduations as a means of figuring out where it is and how far to go. Kind of similar to how a wheel speed sensor works if that's a better analogy. It also manages velocity and acceleration control with this. To map rotational motion to linear distance traveled, they're going to have the motor revs linked to the pitch of the ballscrew (linear distance traveled per revolution of the screw) with something like "Y-axis encoder counts per rev" or similar. Not sure how the haas control handles it. As you pointed out the servos were screaming because the gains required to move around all that mass are a hell of a lot higher than what is needed to achieve stability just by itself. Easy to take for granted how the feedback systems and controls work on these things until they're not working right, but it's a very deep and interesting subject.
Good Work Troubleshooting ! I don't own a HAAS, but I own a home built CNC built in 2008. Its what we do, Tsing!!! Cha Ching , ya saved yourself some $$$
I get a kick out of your "superglue solutions". Whether it's on jigs, indexing in vises w/ pin gauges & 123 blocks etc…. Even works for pulling stuck/stripped bolts out of the actual machine! Simplicity is elegance. Great to see you learning how to fix your machine, troubleshooting like a boss. Keep doing what you're doing & pretty soon you'll know the machine inside and out.
Well now I'm self conscious about it 😂. I didn't realize how much I used it until you pointed it out. You probably shouldn't see how often I use hot glue around the shop......
@AudacityMicro I worked 4 years in yamazaki mazak building vtc800-820's so you could say you pick up a thing or 2 to make life easier when constantly building or repairing them
Your videos are so good. Just first music at the beginning a little bit loud. Crazy that ceramic dust got that deep into the machine without affecting backlash.
A lot of other machines from the same shop have major issues. I was told mine only got used on acrylic. Which is exactly what a sales man would tell you 😂. But I haven't seen the same backlash issues, so he may have been telling the truth. It's also possible that they replaced the ballscrews on this machine at some point, since they did apparently replace the motor.
@@AudacityMicro The music level at 12:00 was perfect, maybe the earlier track was a different volume. Editing is great, I can tell you put at lot of work into it.
I agree! I think it has something to do with it being a specialty motor. These OMs aren't exactly common compared to something like a VF2. So even with the motors being smaller, they are more expensive. I found a place you could buy rebuilt ones for $2700, and I saw a used one on eBay for as low as $1800ish.
@@AudacityMicroI hate that they are so expensive they are selling them 3 times the price of a new one from a reputable brand like Siemens, Schneider, ABB etc.
$5000 from haas, not including labor, which they would insist on, 3000 rebuilt from a reputable source, $1700 used on ebay 😑. These things are just expensive.
@@AudacityMicro Whole machines arent worth that much in Europe thats a bloody ripoff. Such a motor doesnt even cost that much if it were from Siemens. Theyre like max 800 bucks in that size.
I would call them to save a lot of time to figure out what is the issue. They have a service department and make sure you do that before you tear into the machine.
Depends on how much work you want to put in! In general it's more precise than the majority of my processes. Realistically I wouldn't want to take a part that's tighter than about +/-0.0005. the machine could probably do more, but I'm not sure I could at the moment.
that motor is not worth 5k ... $300 old cross stock at most with the incoder. 600 from a we carry orem parts style place. the stepper motor itself tested at spec and certified from a high end manufacture .. 150 ish in it's generic form. not sure what the custom roter would run but you can get a generic 2 ended roter and get it turned down to an adapter without to much more cost re using the previous ends or milling to size the provided ones to reconect the encoder. now do i think someone would and could charge 5k for that stupid thing yes. i do . in fact i know the kinds of places that do that. The idea behind that price tho is you call and they got. if they dont got they make it right then and there and you have it in as short a time as possible. if there not sending it NEXT or SAME day emergincy delevory then you dont need to spend that much on it.
If I were you have a technician come look at as I had an issue like you and found out it was the x axis drive. The y axis drive could have went bad. Just trying to help out as I have a tm2 machine from haas and it still works very well.
I cleaned most of the machine pretty well. All of the actual mechanical components are pretty clean, but there are definitely some nooks and crannies in the casting that need more TLC.
Correct you did but a 20 year old machine and this may cost you a ton of money to get it fixed correctly. As I said and can’t say it enough call the haas factory outlet to get what they would do in your spot as a technician.
I unfortunately disagree. I'm in the same boat as you. Running on a tormach,limited in what I can do and achieve . When the cash flow gets to the point I can handle 5k monthly payments for a HAAS I'll sell the tormach and finance for 36-48 months. Your time needs to be invested making parts and bidding on jobs. Good luck
The machine has already paid for itself 🤷♂️. I had just as many problems with my tormach, and it costed twice as much as my Haas. My payments are about $450. I can afford to spend a few days a year working on the machine.
