Delta Electronic Measuring System

[Lee Alkureishi]

Hi all,

I recently purchased a 1974 unisaw, and am working on restoring it. It came with a unifence, and a "Delta Electronic Measurement System" which I believe is an electronic readout for the fence. I slide it onto the fence rail, and it reads from capacitive tape which is stuck to the underside of the rail.

I replaced the batteries, and it started up. But, the numbers on the screen constantly flicker, rarely settling on a single number. A couple of times, it stabilized and moving the device did change the distance readout so it seemed to work, albeit briefly. But, then it started up again...

In addition to the batteries, there is a wire which comes out of the device also. It ends in bare wire, so I'm guessing there's supposed to be a connector of some kind on the end of it. But, I don't know what it's supposed to connect to. So, I have a couple of questions:

1) What is the wire supposed to connect to?

2) Will connecting the wire fix the readout, or is the device toast?

3) How is the device supposed to connect to the fence?

4) Does anyone have a manual for this little guy?

Thanks in advance!

Lee

[Ray Newman]

I do believe that Delta offered the EMS in the early 90's.

If I recall correctly, it was not a very strong seller and was soon discontinued. I bought one on a close out, but for the life of me, I can not recall how it was set up. I do remember that the black box attached to the Uni-fence base via a bracket, and I think the the wire attached to a "reader" that read the distance on the tape?

It seem,ed to eat the barreries; however, that may hve been the result of lower tempertaures in my shop or using "economically" priced batteries.

Have you tried contacting Delta?

[Ray Newman]

Just found something that maybe of help:
http://www.toolpartsdirect.com/cgi-bin/schematic.cgi/delta/32-013

Might also try here:
http://www.acetoolrepair.com/parts-delta-for-32-013.html

[Lee Alkureishi]

Hi Ray,

Thanks so much for the info. I contacted Delta to see about obtaining the bracket. Still no idea about the wire though - hopefully they'll be able to clue me in!

Lee

[Roger Feeley]

You didn't say how many wires were in the cable.
What colors are the wires? Red, Green and Black would be nice.
One test you can perform without doing harm is to see if it's simple serial asynch.

If it's asynch one wire will be a ground wire. If you can open the device up, it's usually not too tough to see which is ground. That's useful.
Fire the thing up and put a multimeter on it. You are looking for +3-15volt dc across one of the leads to ground. Usually it's right at 10V. Then if you move it, you should see the voltage flicker from + to -. That would suggest data.

If all you are getting is +-10v, it should be safe to feed this into serial port on your computer. You find yourself a female DB9 connector and solder the ground to pin 5 and the other wire to pin 2. Then the games begin. You fire up some sort of terminal program like Windows HyperTerminal or any of the other free ones on the web. Start out with 8 data bits and no parity. The only variable you need is the baud rate. I would start at 9600 and work my way both up and down.

If you do get any sort of data stream, post the stream of hex digits and I will see if I can help you make sense of it. The next step would be to find a way to move the fence in a repeatable way by clamping blocks at two points and moving back and forth between them while measuring the movement with a dial indicator. Code breakers would call this a 'crib'. The dial indicator is giving you the clear text and the DRO is giving you the encrypted text.

Full disclosure: I have over 25 years in data communications as a programmer. I am not a hardware guy but you pick things up along the way.