Old bed mill, 1985 matsuura

[graffian]

Bought it on Ebay last year. I was looking at interacts, seem fine machines. The ones I was looking at[looow price ones] all seemed to have the 151 controler, I almost bought a really nice one with a load of tooling but the fact it didn't do three axis simultanous motion and not being that keen on a knee put me off. Found a 1979 matsuura for sale, must admit 1979 sounded a bit ridicoulous, not that I had any prior knowledge of 70s/80s computers. Then I spotted a 1985 machine on ebay.

It will never be that pretty again. But it will take up less room.

I actually bid almost a thousand more than I got it for, so I was pretty pleased. When I was offered the one I mentioned above I got the floor plans and stuff from Matsuura. It would fit quite resonably in my garage, when the ajax was flogged. I was under no illusion that the original control would go at some point as I had seen posts on cnczone saying what it cost to have these things mended.

When the machine was dropped off, it turned out to be a newer model and at least a foot larger all round, maybe 3 foot deeper, I am seriously considering putting a cat flap in the wall for the y axis servo motor to stick through[the yaxis motor sticks out over 2 feet]. The weight is also 1.4 tons more! So I bit the bullet and stripped all the tin and electrics off it straight away. I still have a drive stacked with green bits of sheet metal 6 months on[can it really be 6 months!]

First job was to re-attach the pendant. it used to be on an arm fixed to the bigger of the electrical enclosures. I knocked up an articulating arm to botl the pendant to. Made a motherboard tray to mount the motherboard in the pendant. Put a flat screen in the pendant and used some of the original switches. I will have manual controls for some stuff that was controled manually before, lubrication pump overide, coolant pump spindle and slew and jog. I also put usb sockets on the front panel. Only drive is a hard drive, usb memory sticks can be used to stick drawings on it. I need to sort out silk screening the panel, or buy a nice new sharpie;)


I am really slow, mounting the computer took me about two months!

Over christmas I mounted a new[another ebay bargain] rittal enclosure.
This took an awfull long time as I put a 4 inch square box around the machine for the wires to run in and used the original caterpillar conduit stuff. The two pieces of flexiconduitstuff are different sizes[4x2 and 6x3] after mounting them and fabricating end boxes tobolt them in I decided the pieces should be switched, I had to start again.

The axis haven't moved since I have had it. stripped the lube lines to the Z axis and moved it last week. Amazing how nicely it moves with a cordless drill battery. I started to strip the Xaxis lube system, got the manifold off, the one that lives near the Xservo motor under the table. I stripped the showa PSS1 valves out of it and when I was reassembling them noticed one is a PSS2, oh no !. I am no stranger to stripping parts and taking care with assemblies to make sure parts aren't mixed;-)

I haven't bought drives yet, I will be getting the granite drives, I was going to get a cnc brain but think I will wait untill a few more are being used[reliably used].