New member wants to rebuild.

Hi There.
At last I've joined this community! I am an amateur / hobby engineer with ever reducing spare time. I have 2 lathes (10inch and little 2 1/2 inch), a manual mill, large pillar drill and... a small nc mill. The mill was a prototype I did for somone 20 years ago. Basically, mechanically, it's an early Isel gantry mill, cutting area about A4, ball screws throughout. It's extruded construction but very stiff. X and Y are servos, z is stepper and the current controller will interpolate X and Y, but not Z, so its 2 1/2D in old money. It works well and I've profiled mild steel with no problems, needless to say its very accurate, microns in x and y.

The controller is a vintage eurosystem (now baldor). I use a modern cam package to produce a standard file (I forget which) and have written my own post processor to convert to the controller which drip feeds commands in mint328 down rs232. This is now getting very dated and is slow when many points needs to be sent, the mill will run faster than I can send. I did start building anither controller with the intention of making it 3 axis servo, new amps, new servos new controller but this controller is still 1990's vintage I had as spare.. nice as it would be able to cut screw threads! But basically its dated and having to write the software, well.. I just dont have the time any more! What I am looking to do is 1. Rebuild it 3xstepper with a cheap but reliable controller that will just work with g codes without having to write my own post processors or 2. pass what I have on to somone with more time. I'd like to use it more but simple and straight forward. Any advice on capable stepper / controller combinations would be great!

If I move to steppers I will have some spares, namely 5 servos with encoders, amps, controllers, racks,all the documentation, dlls, and all the source code I've written. I'm sure a lovely project for somone who has the time!

I also have some ball screws laying around from a previous project, 2 I can find, 37" and 38" both 14mm x 5mm pitch with bearings and nuts and a linear rail with slide 39" x 23mm. Theres a shorter ball screw somewhere but cant currently find it. Anybody want those?

Other stuff, I wrote a bit of software for a mate that converts the old denford binary dos files to and from text files for a lovely old starturn, if anyones interested!

So thats me!

Tom

Welcome to the site Tom, good luck with the rebuild i look forward to seeing how you get on.

Hi There
Already deep in conversation with a member! Wondering if I ought to power up the other servo system and see if it smokes!