I'm about to buy a 5 hp. VFD drive for my hardinge CHNC. Looking at automation direct, I see three categories of drives
Categories L100 Drives (Volts per Hertz ctrl mode) SJ100 Drives (sensorless vector or V/H ctrl modes) SJ300 Drives (sensorless or flux vector ctrl modes)
Not knowing squat, I'm tempted to buy the middle price one - SJ100 series. Correct choice? What's the difference?
You can get expert advice here:
Steve
Karl Townsend wrote:
The SJ300 offers more sophisticated multi-motor control functions plus the ability to take the feedback from a motor speed encoder for super accurate speed control. For a single stand-alone spindle drive, the SJ100 should do fine. I have one on my lathe. The L100 is the basic no-frills unit with simple v/hz control. It would probably work OK but the low speed torque is not as good as the SJ100.
Randy
Well I'm far from a expert but I just got through installing a L200 drive yesterday. So far it seems to work fine for the application (rerolling news paper rolls). My only complaint is that the manual could be a little better organized. It took me 4 hours to find the one parameter which was preventing remote control of the controller.
BTW I got the L200 drive for a lot less than they're asking on that site. You might look at this site for reference.
Thanks for saving me $100. I just orderred.
Karl
Buy the cheap one. You don't need precision positioning, just rough speed control. The Volts/Hz mode should be fine for a lathe spindle.
Jon
You're welcome.
The L200 series seems to be a fairly versatile drive (though as I stated I'm far from a expert). Actually that could be it's drawback since there's so many ways to hook it up that some of the settings get lost in the noise. Just be sure to note that if you use the logical inputs that the #4 terminal come inverted from the factory. That's what it took me 4 hours to find. I was using a momentary switch to control the speed from a remote but I couldn't figure out why the speed would never increase. It turns out that the factory setting of that terminal cause the controller to think that the down speed button was always being pushed.
Wayne Cook Shamrock, TX
Hey, Wayne,
I'd say Karl owes you a sack of apples, at least, for your advice!
Yep. :-)
Wayne Cook Shamrock, TX
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