EBay Purchase

After waiting a bit for my xy table/slides to be motor freighted to me, it finally arrived on a Monday.

Picked up the XYZ stuff from the shipper at lunchtime so I could draft an employee to carry it into my place once we had broke it down on the shipping pallet it had arrived on.

Gloated over my massive hardware! (Ok someone with a CNC mill would not think it massive.)

Electronics and stepper motors also arrive from the store; box is almost totaled on one corner but everything appears to be ok.

That evening I started unwrapping everything to figure out what I had, found out the XY stage had servo’s rather then steppers motors.

My question about how many wires coming out of the motor was answered by the number of the pins on the connector; which was four and turned out to be two for the motor, ground and an unused pin!

Dumb luck aside the old servos were NEMA 23 mounts, the same as the stepper motors from the store! Good thing I decided to order the steppers motors from the reprap store!

But hey the old servo's are NEAM 23 mounts, so I rapidly mount two of the steppers!

Needed to slightly drill the coupling plastic in the center to make the motors fit as the shaft is a bit longer on the stepper motors. Fifteen minutes of work and my X&Y stepper motors are mounted!

In looking over the electronics portion that I had brought from Ebay it was very interesting and told me a bit about its history.

From ExMrClean

Look at that locking emergency stop button!

First off it wasn't recent hardware as the PC portion of the main control unit did not have a PS/2 style keyboard connector and most of the boards plugged into it are ISA style. (Still haven't fired it up to see what was on it, suspect DOS).

From ExMrClean

Another big clue is as clean as the electronics are it had to have spent it's working life in a clean room, (not a speck of dust on any of the four fans) so the dust shields on the mechanics where more and likely to protect what was being handled verses the mechanics them selves.

So I suspect given that the control box also had pneumatic valves and that only the X&Y connectors are wired and the Z electronics were unused that this was a part of a semiconductor manufacturing line.

From ExMrClean

Ah the easy clean life of your first career is over, your new name is ExMrClean!

Given what I know now, should have told the vendor to keep the electronics and just shipped me the mechanical components. That way they could have been shipped UPS, rather then on a crate via motor freight.

From ExMrClean

From ExMrClean

From ExMrClean

EBay Lessions Learned:

1. Pure dumb luck that my stages arrived in NEAM 23 format, should have queried as to the actual model number of the motor. My Z axis had a Pittman GM9000 series motor so was enough real estate on its mount to overlay a drill pattern for the NEAM 23 format.
   
2. E-Bay XY stuff is more in likely for fine positioning rather then motion control (CNC) for handling semiconductor masks in IC manufacturing. Very precise stuff; but analog which doesn’t fit our model. I could have avoided truck shipment of the package as the electronics module is what put it over UPS standards.
   
3. Might have been able to re-use the servo motors by buying Gecko G320 drivers for them, but then would have also needed a higher voltage power supply. Motor’s are brush driven, might have needed new brushes, etc.