Originally Posted by
John K Jordan
When the VFD died on one of my lathes I got started with some advice from a friend. I have considerable experience with wiring, electricity, and electronics but none of it applied to programming the VFD. I bought a cheap chinese VFD, figured out the control motor wiring from the manual and by comparing it to the old VFD (pretty easy) then dived into the programming. I had made a list of the parameters on the old VFD but the new one has some different parameters and a lot of different terminology! It was a challenging puzzle, especially since I had no knowledge of what some of the parameters even did. But I finally figured it out and the lathe has been working well since. The manuals for the old snd new VFDs helped a lot.
Starting from scratch might be daunting. However, there is a lot of experience here and many are willing to help. Do you know someone locally that has some experience with this? That would be the easiest (and maybe the safest) way to proceed. The control electronics can’t hurt you (typically low voltage DC, like a battery) but the high voltage AC is another story.
Sorry, I can’t recommend a specific resource for learning about the AC wiring although there are lots of books - probably one at the local Home Depot, etc. Or safest, hire an electrician if an experienced friend is not available to wire up the potentially dangerous part, the power and the motor. You might even find an electrician experienced in installing VFDs, wouldn’t hurt to call some and ask. There are probably lots of youtube videos and web sites about wiring and VFDs but I haven’t checked.
JKJ