phase ii rotary table free sample

I am in the process of outfitting my new(old) Ex-Cell-O mill with some tooling. I have a line on a Phase II 222-410 10 inch tilting rotary table for what I believe is a good price. I believe that it fits in well with some of the work I am planning on doing, but I really don"t have a good feel for how it would work out in practice as opposed to in theory. The work I am planning on setting up for is checkering pistol front straps, specifically 1911 style. There are other patterns I plan to work with, but they all involve the same basic setups on the table. The cuts are made in vertical, as well as horizontal axis, around a radius. I included an example of the work I am describing. I have the basic idea for indexing the radius (which varies somewhat by manufacturer) as well as a fixture to hold the frames without marring the surface. My specific question is related to the accuracy/repeatability of the tilt. I would prefer to just turn the dial to 90 degrees without having to re-setup in the new axis. Are these units(assuming in good shape) able to consistently go between horizontal and vertical, once set up correctly. If so, It would probably save a great deal of time and eliminate at least some of the potential for human error? Also, Is it rigid enough to perform that type of work without inducing a lot of chatter or deflection. The work will all be light cuts.

Years ago, before I learned CNC, I owned a Phase II 8″ horizontal/vertical rotary table that I purchased from Kap Pullen’s Getmachinetools.com store. He has them at a good price, BTW, and he’s a darned nice fellow to deal with as well as being a frequent HSM contributor. Anyway, its a nice little table, but I hadn’t done a whole lot with it for quite a while after purchasing it. As is so often the case, one day, a project landed on my doorstep and I was glad to have it.

Before I could get started, however, I had to make some accessories for it. Basically, I needed some T-Nuts to fit the table, as well as a little fixture that makes it easy to hold a plate up off the table through a hole in the center so you can machine it. The latter, what I call a “plate machining fixture”, was inspired by something similar I saw the Widgitmaster of CNCZone fame using to make Dremel clamps for his mini-router:

I turned the round spigot using the 4-jaw on the lathe. I’m making the fixture out of MIC-6 aluminum plate, which is pre-ground very flat on the sides. This is a 5 inch by 3 inch piece. I’ve clamped it to the rotab using my T-nuts and the regular mill clamps and step blocks. It is sitting on parallels to make sure I don’t cut into the table. You can also see how I’ve clamped the rotary table to the mill table using a big cast iron V-block I have. You can never have to many blocks with precision faces hanging around!

Having a 4-jaw chuck on your rotary table is mighty handy! Because it’s a 4-jaw, you can dial in the workpiece by adjusting the jaws until it is perfectly concentric with the table’s axis of rotation. The best way is to make an adapter plate that attaches to the back of the chuck in the same way that your lathe does so you can exchange lathe tooling with the rotab. Here is an example:

For the example, the chuck is threaded onto the adaptor plate, and then the holes in the adapter plate’s flange are used to bolt down to T-nuts on the table.

In my case, I bought a 4-jaw from Shars brand new, and simply drilled some through-holes in the chuck to mount to the table directly without an adapter plate:

First, you want to make sure your part is properly centered on the table. To do that, I clamp the table down on the mill table (no special place is needed), put my Indicol indicator holder on the mill spindle, and find some round feature on the part to indicate on. For example, on the plate milling fixture above, indicate on the round boss, or on the center hole. Spin the table and bump the part in until spinning the table doesn’t move the indicator.

Second, locate the center of rotation directly under the mill spindle. You can simply use the X and Y table handwheels to do this. Use that Indicol to indicate off of a circular feature you want centered under the spindle. Turn the indicol around on the spindle and adjust the handwheels until the indicator stays put relative to the spindle position. A Blake Coaxial indicator will make this last even simpler.

When you’re rounding partially by cranking a part around on the rotary table, it’s really easy to go a little too far and screw things up. The answer is to drill the end points to make the exact stopping point on the rotab a lot less sensitive:

Centering with a Blake indicator is really fast, but what if you don’t have a Blake, or worse, what if your mill is too small to accomodate one? Here is a nice solution I found on a German site. This fellow has made an ER collect fixture for his rotary table, and has taken care that when installed on the table, the axis of the collet is aligned with the table’s axis. He can then place a dowel or other straight pin in the collet and line up until it will go into a similarly sized collet on the spindle. Nice trick! It’s similar to how Widgitmaster showed me to align a drill chuck on a QCTP to the lathe centerline with a dowel pin held in the lathe chuck.

PI’s direct-drive rotary tables with frictionless, brushless, closed-loop torque motors provide the best combination of high accuracy, high velocity, and maximum service life. PI provides closed-loop direct drive rotary tables with both mechanical bearings and air bearings. Stage models with large apertures and low profile are available. The stage design is optimized for high speed, stiffness, and high load capacity. If completely friction-free and maintenance free motion with virtually unlimited lifetime is required, air bearing rotation tables are recommended. These ultra-precision, high-speed rotary tables provide vibration-free motion with extremely high accuracy and negligible runout, wobble and eccentricity errors. The lack of lubricants makes these also clean room compatible and ideal for any high-performance metrology application in optics, photonics, and semiconductor manufacturing, test and metrology related projects.

In contrast to worm gear driven rotary stages or belt-drive rotation stages, torque-motor direct drive stages eliminate play in gears, couplings or flex in drive belts, providing motion with zero backlash and excellent constancy of velocity, while achieving higher speed than worm-gear drives.

PI’s precision direct-drive, positioning tables can be used in high performance factory automation, research, semiconductor, and laser processing applications. Due to the use of brushless high-torque, motors with direct metrology position feedback, backlash is completely eliminated, and reliability is greatly improved.

With modern direct-metrology rotary encoders, sensor resolution down to 1/100th of a microrad is available on select models with large rotary table platforms, using the high interpolation factors

Based on the high encoder resolution and powerful servo controllers, the direct-drive rotary tables also provide excellent velocity control, which is required in automation applications including high-speed laser processing, indexing, and semiconductor wafer inspection.

Most Direct Drive Rotation stages can be mounted horizontally and vertically, and with combinations all 3 rotary degrees of freedom (3DOF, pitch, yaw, and roll) can be addressed.

The rotary tables and trunnion drives of the EXPERT-TÜNKERS EDX series are precision indexer with fixed pitch and maximum torque. They are used for dynamic cycles of loads up to 20 tons. The drive takes place via an energy-efficient geared three-phase motor.

A characteristic of EDX Series rotary tables is the fact that the dial plate is continuously driven by two cam followers. In addition, this double meshing of the roller pins ensures virtually zero-backlash locking of the turntable plate in the operating position. Alternatively, this can be achieved by widening the zero position.

The indexing positions of the rotary table are defined in the motion profile specified in the indexing cam. Most common, partitions are 2-stop = 180°, 3-stop = 120° and 4-stop = 90°. Individual solutions are available on request.

Typical applications for EXPERT-TÜNKERS turntables are, for example, the change of work pieces in body shop welding systems, the insertion and removal of work piece carriers, or as a turntable for clocked work sequences in series production. The EDX Series of rotary tables are not only suitable for conventional use as rotary tables but also as trunnion drive units with a horizontal axis of rotation. These trunnion systems can provide several tooling’s for flexible production lines.

The EDX Series of rotary tables are not only suitable for conventional use as rotary tables but also as trunnion drive units with a horizontal axis of rotation. These trunnion systems can provide several toolings for flexible productionlines.

This compact closed-loop direct drive rotary table uses a 3-phase motor for maintenance free, frictionless power transmission. It comes in two variations, standard and with holding brake.

Application video of the silent ultrasonic piezo motor rotary stage in a Leica Theodolite and Principle Design of the PILine drive used in the M-660 PILine� rotary stage

This miniaturized closed-loop rotary positioner is driven by an ultrasonic direct-drive motor and provides high rotational velocity up to 3 revolutions / second. An optical encoder is integrated for direct position measurement and feedback with 35 �rad resolution.

Q-motion series miniature rotation stages are driven by inertia-type piezo motors. These miniaturized positoining tables are direct-driven, backlash free and provide micro-radian resolution. The self-locking design requires no holding current and provides excellent long-term stability. Three different diameters are available: 14 mm, 22 mm and 32 mm.