The saga continues.............
Encouraged by some help on the Yahoo Gecko group, I ordered two Gecko's for my TCL 125. I am very impressed, so I thought I would share the figures. Originally, I had stripped out the Boxford/BBC micro bits and replaced them with the standard £30.00 Allegro type 30 Volt 3amp drivers. This gave me 1.8 m/min speed for a G00 move before the steppers stalled. Toolplate video on the Mach Youtube site shows what was achieved (Posted as dvbydt).
I have attached photos of the electronics and the method I used to measure the torque at the ball screw.
In comparison, holding torque is up from 0.59 Nm to 0.90Nm and at cutting feed speeds from 0.30 Nm to 0.85 Nm. Maximum speed of the steppers is also up from 920 rpm to 1350rpm and I am out of speed with Mach3 at 45 Khz. This was with the same power supply at 27volts. More fine tuning and a 48 Volt power supply to come.
This will probably only give a 10-15% improvement in cycle time for simple components but will give increased metal removal rates on heavy cuts.
I'll keep you posted!
Ian
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