Feeder issue solved.

[spiyda]

I had some feeder issues over the last few days and it may help others if they have similar problems
some of it is obvious, some less so.  sorry no pictures as I was too busy trying to fix the problem.

The first issue was that I bought some capacitors that were too tall for the feeder guide plates.

I found phonoplug's post on the forum with pics of some custom feeder guide plates, unfortunately for a different feeder design to mine.
but, knowing they could be modified, and since I have a milling machine, no excuse not to try, I decided to have a go...

I used a feeder I had not been using as it never worked very well, stripped it down, machined the plate (10mm end mill) and re-assembled in a couple of hours, ( with new nitrile belts) all relatively smoothly.

When I came to test with the feedertest utility, it didn't work very well, the pins seemed to grab the (plastic) tape and not retract properly.

First I cleaned the pins and bearing blocks with IPA, flooding the area and working the pins thoroughly..  I then dried it with hot air before retesting.
The cleaning made little difference, but I did spot the problem.

The pins did not line up correctly with the holes in the tape, they were well off centre and because of this they were binding.
I had not altered anything that would affect pin alignment so the problem must have been there since before I obtained the feeder last year.

Re-alignment was easy enough, just a couple of allen set screws to loosen then tighten...  I averaged the error so that the outer lanes have about the same offset but in opposite directions..

The big issue came when I reassembled and tested..  the main moving carriage now fouled on the inside of the cover...  to anyone who has had these apart, the left side of the carriage is machined away even to part way through the oilite block on the left hand side to clear the case..    It looks like it should have been machined even more...

The long term solution would be to machine a bit more off the side of the carriage, but in the interim, I refitted the side of the feeder with a couple of washers to space it out.

The feeder now works perfectly, probably better than it did new !

If you have a feeder that misbehaves, check that the pins line up with the tape sprocket holes!

[spiyda]

Serviced a couple of feeders yesterday, cleaned out a dozen or so components that had worked their way inside and found another issue which might be useful to know,

The home position microswitch was out of adjustment, ( don't ask me how, it was locked down with two lock nuts !)

The problem was that the carriage was starting with the pins halfway down the slots and ending with them just touching the end of the slot

It took a while to work out what was happening ( the symptom was that the  pins were not dropping before the carriage started back to the home position, this in turn was pulling the tape back with it and causing a miss-pick )

but a bit of adjustment and with the help of Mike's feedertest utility ran several hundred tape movements on each pin with no problems.

The microswitch is glued in with epoxy, so not looking forward to changing those when they eventualy wear out ! ( I didn't check the spec because the part number is covered with epoxy , but lifetimes vary from 30,000 to 10,000,000 operations,   I just hope its the latter !)