servo drive cylinders

[rod]

Has anyone had any luck with the out of the box cylinder style linear actuator/drive?

I'm looking to update the control and drive of my 2kw 1975 semi auto Eisele pneumatic saw to CNC and it would be great to just drop in a off the shelf electric cylinder? I intend to leave the clamp and fluid functions pneumatic due to them being easy control flow and force, and just use the DO's to fire them on command.

About 18months ago I sorted the feed control for this saw, so I can move the stock to the correct position to cut it...(yes it took that long between work and kids) now its time to actuate the cutting function. Back then I had a fair bit of trouble getting everything to talk electronically, and with all the machining of bushes/shafts ect. This time I'm looking for simple plug and play.

the saw has some pretty serious HP, running a 450mm blade at 3000rpm so I want something pretty strong/reliable, I need about 200mm stroke and saw cycle will be about 2-3 seconds. It looks achievable from the research I have done so far, but I'm hoping to steel a little knowledge on which actuator system talks best to Masso (gen1), maybe a contact as to where to purchase. my current suppliers are yet to deal with these things.

check out this link if you not sure what I'm talking about

Electric cylinder - All industrial manufacturers

www.directindustry.com

cheers

Rod

 

[safeairone]

No experience with those electric linear actuators, but I was wondering...why not just use a dual-acting pneumatic cylinder to move the saw if you only need 200mm of travel?

Pneumatic cylinders are cheap, powerful and easy to actuate with a single Masso-controlled solenoid. You can set the rate of travel easily, you can control the amount of cushion at the end of travel, plumbing is dead-simple.

Here s an example of a pneumatic tool I made; the only input is a momentary-contact foot switch. This tool pushes about 945 pounds of force:

 

[rod]

Thanks for your idea! however...

problem with air in the ram, is that air is compressible. so as the saw engages it will tend to bite or buck, with the HP and speed involved with these saws, material or bits of blade have been known to fly a long way when air gets mixed in the original hydraulic control system, so control of position needs to be pretty smooth - not that its high force - just gentle consistent drop. If I where to go with using the direct outputs I believe I would need to use hydraulic over pneumatic system, which becomes complex and expensive. further to this I don't get the ability to control the depth of cut which would be nice..

 

[evermech]

@rod

If you are talking about a servo driven ball screw actuator that is like a cylinder in operation then yes I have used one. We used it on a linear rail system to position a router to trim the side off of a wood product. The wood was random width so we had a banner to measure the wood as it passed then the actuator would position the router head to the appropriate position at 40 cycles per minute. As far as controlling the feed of a power cut off saw I would think it would be no problem as long as you can control the pulse and frequency logic to get some sort of adjustable feed speeds. If you are using a Masso to control the machine I could see how you could use Gcode based commands to control it

Guy

 

[rod]

hey Guy,

looks like you have used a similar beast, essentially I'm looing for are a servo, with ball screw drive, ideally packaged ready to drop in where a cylinder once lived... plug into masso and away we go... in a perfect world.

in reference to the one that you had success with... was it compatible with Masso?

what was it called, brand and model maybe ?

where did you get it?

 

[evermech]

@rod

cant remember off hand brand name but it definitely would be compatible with Masso. The driver for it accepted pulse and direction signals. I will try to do some snooping around and find what that was for you.

Guy

 

[evermech]

@rod

Well can't seem to stir up any info on the actuator that was used, it was from a few years back. Pretty well any modern servo and driver accepts step and direction signals and would be suitable

Guy