Triumph 5250-A Blade Descent Issue - Not Reaching Paper

Discussion in 'Cutters and Trimmers' started by AKMAIL1, Mar 20, 2014.

  1. AKMAIL1

    AKMAIL1 New Member

    Joined:
    Mar 2014
    Messages:
    2
    Location:
    Massachusetts USA
    Hello everyone,

    I have a Triumph 5250A cutter that has been working very well, it's in good shape but in the past 24 hours has been giving me trouble.

    At first, the clamp was not (always) automatically returning home when the buttons were released after a cut. It took an additional press of the "Reset" button (inner left) and then the clamp would return.

    Now the problem has gotten a little worse: The blade stops well before it should. Sometimes without even hitting the paper. If you actuate the blade and the clamp simultaneously, the clamp comes down, the blade comes down with it but then *sudden stop* - everything freezes - and the orange cutting scale light goes out with your fingers still depressing the buttons.

    When you release the buttons both the blade and the clamp retract properly!

    We took the top plate off the machine today and inspected inside but could not see anything obviously wrong.

    The behavior with the clamp and blade descending and stopping doesn't happen 100% of the time, either: occasionally (about 30% of the time) the machine cycles perfectly normally.

    Any ideas or pointers would be appreciated in the extreme. We're qualified to work on electrical equipment (have an in house EE). We have a schematic for the machine but we're wondering whether anyone has a few words to help get us started. This behavior began today - the machine's been working great for several years with 0 problems prior to this.

    Thank you in advance, we really appreciate any help that could be offered.
     
  2. AKMAIL1

    AKMAIL1 New Member

    Joined:
    Mar 2014
    Messages:
    2
    Location:
    Massachusetts USA
    We figured it out. Actually, we didn't "figure" it out, we kind of got lucky.

    We took the machine's covers off and inspected all the wiring and cleaned everything with vacuum. None of the switches or relays seemed to be malfunctioning.

    Then, with the power accidentally on we tripped one of the large switches on the power rail that reverses the main motor. Forgot to turn the power off. Dumb. Always turn the power off!!! But we didn't this one time and pushed one of the big switch blocks on the main power bar just to test if it moved. It scared the crap out of us right away because the motor jumped.

    What it did was to turn the main drive gear backward by 5 or 6 teeth until it was almost out of engagement with the pinion. So we got under the machine and tried to manually turn the motor shaft to re-engage the main drive gear with the pinion gear. Well that didn't work.

    HOWEVER: Turning the motor shaft had done something. We turned the machine back on and pushed the buttons and the machine reset itself and now it's working perfectly. We kid you not.

    We guess that there was a piece of schmutz somewhere on the commutator of the main motor and by accidentally screwing things up we fixed the problem in the process without having to diassemble anything farther.

    Amazing. It works like new and everything's in the right place again. Since we hadn't done it in a while we lubricated all the places Triumph recommends and promptly cut through 200 sheets of 100lb cover like it was butter.

    I do not recommend this "3-stoogelike repair" procedure but it happened to work this time by complete dumb luck. Obviously never touch the power rail of a machine unless the power is both OFF and disconnected. What really did the trick was having to try to manually turn the main motor shaft. That brought all the planets back into alignment.
     
  3. Vishop

    Vishop Member

    Joined:
    Apr 2014
    Messages:
    8
    Location:
    IMPZ, UAE
    I seemed to have the same exact problem, or very close to it.

    Too bad i cant get it the way you did...

    I checked everything already, just physically and visually. Im running out of clues to where the problem may be..
     
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