Nova lathe question

[Mike Ramsey]

I went to visit a friend from my club Sat to work with him on some sharpening issues.
He has a Nova DVR lathe, after I changed some of his bevel angles I tried each gouge
cutting a small piece of green ash on his lathe, as I made my initial cuts the lathe
temporary shut down & made a lot of noise, grinding noise? in the head stock, my friend
said this was normal & the electronics in the head stock took my aggresive cuts as a catch
& stopped. It resusumed after 10 seconds or so, It happened a couple more times with that
scary noise until I began to take light cuts, I'm used to my PM & i tend to get a little aggresive
with my cuts.... My friend is a little hard of hearing & I'm not sure he hears this
noise as loud as I did. My question to the Nova owners is, is this normal?

[Peter Fabricius]

Hi Mike;
This is not normal, get your friend to contact the Nova Service Centre in Florida right away. There is something wrong. The grinding noise is a big concern and the auto stop when the motor senses a catch is another matter.
I had the motor stopping with very light catches when I first got the DVR and all the electronics were replaced with a new main board and all is great now.
It should stop if you get a catch. But, not if you just get little bumps.
Hope you get it fixed.
Peter F.

[Steve Vaughan]

Wouldn't hurt to call and see if they can help you out. But, having said that, a "grinding" noise to one person might not really be a grinding noise as in metal to metal, etc. The dvr, by design, will sense a catch and cut the motor off as a safety feature. It's come in quite handy several times for me. However, there are times when a catch might happen, and the motor (and I'm not gonna be able to describe this adequately) will catch in such a way that it doesn't shut off - it's as if the motor will stop turning, but the current is still trying to turn the armature(?), so there is this weird "grinding" noise. The noise is not actually a grinding of pieces parts, but is the noise of the motor itself, and the juice trying to turn it, but someone out here can describe this way better than me.

When this has happened to me, I simply shut it off using the switch, and then restart. Works fine, no problems. Heck, in the midst of the catch, and I get that noise, I've actually just turned the wood with my hand and she started right back at it, again, just fine. There is a setting you can go to for when you might be rough-turning a large irregular piece. Can't think it through right off hand, it's in the book, but you can set it to a "hard" setting so that the motor knows you're gonna be turning something that might be rough and cause catches.

Now, having said all that, and probably made sense to no one, you really do have to get used to that type of motor, and turning on the DVR. It's not quite gonna be like turning on a pm or similar because of having such a completely different style motor. But, once you learn that, once you know that, and adjust your style, you're good to go!

[Mike Ramsey]

Steve,Your description is pretty much what happened, makes sense as it did not seem to bother my friend at all. .

[Ralph Lindberg]

Mike
Today I purposely got a big catch on my DVR-XP, and it certainly could be called "a scary noise"