We recently completed our first CNC retrofit of a Gear Hob. The machine is used to produce spline gears of varying nature.
Bourn & Koch
This Bourn & Koch Gear Hob was in exellent mechanical condition, but the CNC was no longer able (for whatever reason) to maintain synchronization. After wasting hundreds of dollars in fruitless repairs and countless loss production hours , we were called in and asked to do a "Brain Transplant".
Remove the obsolete electronics
Since we didn't know if the synching problem was caused by the old CNC or the servo drives; we replaced both .
This gave us the added advantge of running our axes in pure digital mode; which is much more responsive.
The new components get installed
The new motors were fitted to the machine and the electrical panel was totally rewired.
A New PC based control
The PC control has a Handwheel, Touchscreen, Detachable Keyboard & Mouse (primarily used for Maintenance), and USB serial port.
Running Test Gears
After the installation was complete, we ran performance tests: Hobbing a Straight Spline gear, Taper gear, Crown gear, Helical gear, and 2 different diameter splines on the same shaft. Then we switched to Milling mode, and demonstrated a spline created using a milling cutter.
And as a final test, we homed the X & Y & Z axis, put blue dye on our previously hobbed gear, set the offset on X to -.001" and re-cut the same spline.
