DICKEYBIRD
04-08-2012, 06:56 PM
I bought a nifty X-axis power feed for my X3 mill from Little M/Shop a few months ago and got up this morning with with no shop commitments for a change and decided to install it.
Fortunately the installation requires removing the electrical guts to install the heavy duty motor & mount plate. When I got it apart I was amused to see how they mounted the speed controller board.
They split a piece of big heat shrink tubing and flattened it out to make an insulator to go between the soldered pins/sticky-outy side of the board and the steel side of the enclosure. It was bad enough that they chose heatshrink material to go into a potentially hot environment but the killer was that the board was screwed down with fiber washers between the board and the "insulator" and the washers were so thin that the board was bent down at the corners, pressing the sharp ends of the component wire stubs straight into the heatshrink material.:eek:
There were 3 deep pinholes into the insulator...not all the way through but well on their way to poking all the way through and shorting out. I whipped up some plastic stand-off tubes with longer screws that solved the problem.
It works great now and should continue to do so...I hope. I'm going to send LMS an email to inform them of the potential hazard. They're a good company and I'm not angry about it. You just have to check Chinese gear and look around for the stupid stuff before you use it.:rolleyes:
Fortunately the installation requires removing the electrical guts to install the heavy duty motor & mount plate. When I got it apart I was amused to see how they mounted the speed controller board.
They split a piece of big heat shrink tubing and flattened it out to make an insulator to go between the soldered pins/sticky-outy side of the board and the steel side of the enclosure. It was bad enough that they chose heatshrink material to go into a potentially hot environment but the killer was that the board was screwed down with fiber washers between the board and the "insulator" and the washers were so thin that the board was bent down at the corners, pressing the sharp ends of the component wire stubs straight into the heatshrink material.:eek:
There were 3 deep pinholes into the insulator...not all the way through but well on their way to poking all the way through and shorting out. I whipped up some plastic stand-off tubes with longer screws that solved the problem.
It works great now and should continue to do so...I hope. I'm going to send LMS an email to inform them of the potential hazard. They're a good company and I'm not angry about it. You just have to check Chinese gear and look around for the stupid stuff before you use it.:rolleyes: