I just installed my 220v HY VFD and a 2.2kw HY spindle. I’ve utilized the manual provided plus some posts here, but I can’t seem to get it up to speed, and right now it’s doing only partial rotations of the shaft. I’m in the US in case that changes any electrical settings.
I really appreciate if someone can provide their settings or point me in the right direction. I obviously want to start cutting again, but I really want to make sure I don’t fry my VFD or spindle. Thanks!
Have you checked the resistance between the three leads to the motor (without the VFD connected to it) to make sure the motor windings are all connected as they should be?
The resistance between any pair of the three should be the same.
The partial rotations sounds like a connection issue.
I’ll have to look into that. I don’t have a multimeter to check that, but perhaps it’s finally time to buy one. I swear I made solid connections, but those solder pots on the aviation connector were tight.
Yep,
A cheap multimeter would be a useful tool for figuring out what’s up with the spindle / VFD.
At least you’ll want one that measures
Something like this would do the job;
LiamN you must be right. Even without a multimeter, I moved my cable around and instead of fixing the rotation issue, it shot a spark out of the connector… Something is definitely not connected well, shorting, or both. Now I vaguely recall that I had normal rotation, although not very fast, like I’d expect, before I did my first homing sequence. Homing the machine caused the wire to move quite a bit since I haven’t found a great way to stabilize it yet. I popped the connector open, and it looks ok in there, although not the best solder job. I’ll try to wrap the solder joints with small bits of electrical tape first, and if that doesn’t help then I’ll reattempt the whole connection. I tried small bits of heat shrink, but they shrunk during the soldering while still hiked up further on the insulation, so I ended up not doing anything.
Hmm, sounds iffy.
Do be careful, the VFD can do over 300V on it’s own, add in the back-EMF from the coils in the motor on a sudden disconnect and 1000V spike is available. Make sure the shell of the spindle is properly grounded and stay away from any live connections.
Thanks! Yes, I’m quite careful around electricity, and although my luck with this aviation connector is interesting, I truly do have a decent background in legitimate electrical work. I only jiggle the cable when I’m not touching any metal. And I’m sure glad I didn’t. I imagine that the solder connections are ok, but that the right amount of cord flex causes one of the connections to contact the housing of the aviation connector, which should be grounded. I think part of my problem is that I bought a legitimate shielded VFD cable and although the wire gauge is only 16, the shielding makes the cable too thick to fit into the aviation connector clamp, so I had to strip the shielding and outer insulation just before the connector. So it’s a big cable with little support at the end. I think zip tying it to a solid part of the machine will also be helpful in keeping it vertical and in line with the connector.
Those runty little connectors do fail to inspire confidence.
I also have a double screened cable and it took me a while to solder the connections in properly, I was just able to get the outer sheath in the clamp on my connector though. Like you I couldn’t get any heat shrink over the pins.
If the motor was only partially rotating though that suggests either one of the 3 motor wires not connected or a persistent short to ground for one of the 3. The persistent short to ground would likely kill the VFD pretty quickly.
I ended up spiral wrapping my power cable to the cooling tubes to reduce the flexing on it;
Nice setup there. It was a long (couple) days of wiring by the time I got to VFD programming and testing right before dinner. But during wiring, I had the wires and tubing going vertical out of the spindle, similar to your’s. I did the programing and tried to press Run and turn the dial on the VFD. I was getting something in the mid 300 range for ROTT when the dial was maxed out, and the spindle appeared to have a correct rotation.
I also did a proximity limit switch upgrade with the spindle upgrade, so I decided to get distracted and tested that. During the homing sequence, my nice vertical cable and cooling hose setup was coerced by the drag chain movement to flop sideways in more of a horizontal direction coming straight out of the drag chains and not returning to vertical until just above the aviation connector clamp, which is also where the cable rigidity is weakest due to the removed insulation. It was after that in which I could no longer get the spindle to make full rotations.
I have the cable and the coolant hoses zip tied together a few times between the end of the drag chain and the top of the spindle, but since I used the typical clear tygon tubing, there’s not much rigidity in that setup. Paired with a very stiff VFD cable with a weak point of removed shielding, I think I need to figure out a rigid way to keep the cable and tubing vertical past the aviation connector for a couple of inches since that’s the area where the cable is most flimsy.
FWIW I used a similar solution to @LiamN spiral wrap: routing the spindle cable and the two water-cooling tubes together using a wrap or clips increases the rigidity of the bundle enough that it won’t flex (at least not in the first few inches past the aviation connector)
The biggest concern I had was the risk of contacts within the aviation connector between the wires, due to my lousy soldering job. I wrapped each solder cup/soldered wired in heat shrink wrap for that reason, and it’s so tight in there that I think it also robustified everything mechanically.
Mine has slowly flopped over to the side, but the bend radius is well within what’s OK for the cable and the flex when the Z axis goes up and down is spread along the length of the cable, not focussed on the outlet of the connector.
I’m working on some 3D printed bracketry to hold them up properly.
If your cable bent that much at the joint is it possible it broke a core in the cable or pulled one of the pins in the aviation connector up out of the housing?
LiamN, I purchased a multimeter today (a fancy one, because go big or go home). I tested just as you explained and the resistance is equal on all 3 leads and I verified the continuity of my cable and lack of shorts. I didn’t need to resolder any of the terminals in the aviation connector. Everything was well attached, but I did everything I could to wrap each terminal with electrical tape to ensure nothing is shorting out there at the end.
I just sent an email to HY’s support email address, but I’m only slightly optimistic that I’ll get a response. Unfortunately both the VFD and spindle are out of stock again on Amazon, so I can’t even order a replacement with hopes to send the old one back as defective.
Any other things you can think that I should test?
OK,
So a few Ohms between each pair of cables (U, V, W on the drive) and it’s even, indicating that all three windings of the motor are still conducting.
No conductivity between the motor power wires and ground?
Shell of the motor has near 0 Ohms to ground pin on the VFD?
The motor spindle spins freely when not powered, makes full rotations without any lumpiness or problems?
If all that is OK then the drive should be able to drive the motor.
When you started it up previously what speed was it indicating on the display?
Which model HY drive do you have?
Probably an idea to do a factory reset and then reconfigure the key params on the drive. (PD0013 == 08 on mine)
Once the config on the drive is checked the next thing will be to power up, set a low speed with the adjuster knob (if you have one) and then see if there’s AC voltage across U, V, W in each combination, should be the same.
Thanks for the replies, LiamN!
Yes to even resistance across the possible pairs within the motor.
Ground functions as it should on the multimeter and isn’t shorted.
Motor spins free and smooth when not powered. Giving it a helping hand spin when powered on doesn’t even help it a little bit.
Previously the speeds were around 350 rpm before any adjustments outside those listed as required prior to startup on the paper insert that came with the spindle. I was confused by this, but figured I’d figure it out better once I started digging in a little deeper.
I have the HY02D223B VFD. It’s the 220v 2.2kw model sold on Amazon.
I have already performed the factory rest a few times. I’ve tried it both with full blown parameter changes as recommended by other posts in this community and also with just the parameters required to be changed on the paper included with the spindle. No luck at all.
Luckily, I was finally able to find the parts on Amazon. I was attempting to reorder what I did originally, which was the VFD and the spindle as separate items. Those are both out of stock, but the exact same spindle and VFD are available as a kit with a dinky water pump (I have a CW-3000 I’ll use). I ordered it and unfortunately it’s going to take about a week for shipping, but if I don’t hear back from my email to HY support, I’ll swap the parts and hope for the best. I’ll be able to handle returning defective parts through Amazon if HY doesn’t pipe up.
That’s the same model I have.
If it’s all still powering up OK then checking for differential AC voltage across all pairs of U, V, W output pins when the motor is supposed to be running is a worthwhile test, if one of the outputs is dead from a short then you’ll get lower voltage on 2 of the 3 pairings, if you measure each to the ground pin you should also see the same AC voltage, again zero on one of them if it’s been shorted and died.
You may find the spindle won’t spin up until a few hundred RPM, might be worth taking it up to 1,000 or 2,000 to check it’s not just slipping at low speed, that should also verify that the potentiometer on the front is in use to control speed and not the analog voltage input pin. (PD001, PD002). You could also set PD027 to 10 to force a 600RPM startup speed.
The other thing that may just be a factory fat-finger-fail is the jumper might be in the wrong place for speed setting, see the pics on this post;
LiamN, I made a dumb. Without a continuity tester (now I have one!) and cheap Chinese switches off of Amazon without any accompanying diagrams, I wired a switch wrong. I am using a switch on those 3 pins with the jumper so that I can swap between manual and automatic spindle control. Since I wired the switch wrong, I was bridging the wrong pins (I think it was the outer 2, which isn’t even a valid combination).
Now that you convinced me to get a multimeter that does continuity, I was able to figure that out and wire it correctly. Everything works perfectly! Thanks for your help!
The only thing I want to put here, though unrelated to our previous posts but possibly someone will search for this in the future, is that screw terminals FC and FA are backwards compared to how they appear in the user’s manual. FA is actually the normally open relay and FC is the normally closed relay. I use this along with PD052 = 32 to turn on my dust collector (via iOT relay) anytime the spindle is spinning.
Great, now you’re cutting again 
Figuring out what these drives are doing between the odd user manuals and limited displays is not exactly easy at the best of times though.
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