Quick look at modified rotab

[tonyfoale]

I recently bought a 200 mm rotary table to fit up with a motor as a 4th axis on my CNC mill. I wanted to largely automate making clutch centres with my pneumatic slotter previously posted here Slotter or broach driver. , and also as a camshaft holding and rotating headstock for a planned CNC cam grinding machine.

Click images for full size.

In addition to being purely CNC driven I wanted to have a manual control with some useful automatic features. So I built a suitable control box with three operational modes. Viz:
1. Jogging. The table rotates as long as I hold a button down. Speed is variable between dead slow to plenty fast enough.
2. Indexing. I enter a number of divisions in a circle and each time I press the GO button it indexes around to the next division.
3. Go To. I enter an angle and press GO. It then moves to the angle at the set speed.



A couple of days back I needed to do some indexed milling and drilling on some motorcycle brake hubs for my race bike. This was the first job for the device and it was a great time saver. These are the BEFORE and AFTER pix.



I made a 55 second short video which shows the use of the indexing and continuous mode.

I will make a full post showing full details of the motor conversion and control unit in due course. For now I only have time for this quick look