MF70 CNC New Drive & Motors

TB6560 Drive (Box Closed)

TB6560 Drive (Box Open)

TB6560 Drive Y-Axis DIP-Switch Fix

Here is the new motor driver installed and working with the new steppers. It is the infamous 3-Axis TB6560 Chinese driver commonly found on ebay. I could have designed and built my own, but the price was too attractive to pass up. The board supports 1/16 microstepping and 3.5A per channel @ up-to 36V supply. Combined with the new motors (Minebea/Astrosyn, apparently salvaged from Diebold ATMs) the speeds have more than doubled-up, at slightly more than 200mm/s.

The enclosure (from a local supplier) is of good quality, but ultimately an overkill, and it is a bit too large for this board. Unfortunately, the nearest size in the manufacturer’s catalog was just a couple of centimeters smaller than the board.

Despite all that looks good on paper, I have to be wary of recommending this driver board, because mine turned out to be defective! Upon testing, I found out that the Y-axis was not providing enough torque. Some inspection with a multimeter revealed that the DIP-switch for the Y-axis was broken, resulting in the current setting being ignored. The fix was easy, with just a couple of wires, as in the photo above. Nevertheless, this just seems like another example of fine (!) Chinese manufacturing on display.

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Upgrading the MF70 CNC Part 2

MF70 CNC Mk.2 X Axis Endplates

MF70 CNC Mk.2 X Axis Closeup

As one may guess from the photos above, the polyamide endplates did not work well at all (and that is an understatement). So I had to switch back to aluminium, as it is still rather inexpensive and in the end I was not sure if even Delrin would be rigid enough in this case. As a matter of fact, Alcofribas had suggested that I use brass instead. I might have taken that route if I did not already have some alu in hand. Brass seems to be more expensive and quite a bit heavier than aluminium, but apparently it is machined dry. My setup is rather poor in handling the coolant generally required when milling aluminium, so this would have been an important advantage.

Having to go back to aluminium motivated me to do some research in milling speeds and feeds and coolant types. I found out the MF70 spindle was powerful enough to take deeper cuts in aluminium (1.5mm vs. 0.5mm) at my current feeds (about 90mm/m and 8000rpm). Apparently these numbers are still far from optimal, but they were a big improvement over my previous setup, which took far too long to mill the parts and caused the spindle to overheat pretty quickly. If the MF70 spindle horsepower permits, I plan to even further increase feeds (once I upgrade the steppers) to see how far I can take this. I can also confirm that ethanol performs quite well as a coolant for milling aluminium.

Another “improvement” was that I finally managed to obtain a dial test indicator, thanks to ebay. Measuring the backlash on all axes, I found it to be around 0.1mm, which is not exactly low, but easily compensated in software. In fact, this performs so well that I may not even bother to implement the split-nut anti-backlash nut design I was referring to in my previous post.

Finally, even though the new parts came out quite nice, the performance improvement with the old steppers was marginal. So, I decided to give priority to upgrading the steppers and the drivers over upgrading the mechanical parts. Depending on how that goes, I will decide if it is worth to actually rebuild the Y and Z axes.