HI,

Hoping for some advice. I came across a Beaver mill (VRP) a few years ago and as it was only £1 I bought it. It has Anilam crusader II CNC controls that don't work. The mill came out of a college and has apparently sat in a corner for many years due to a fault in the CNC controls.

Roll forward a few years and it's in the way. I need to decide if I go with my manual Bridgeport or sort the beaver mill and sell the Bridgeport. To be honest I fancy having a cnc machine and the beaver mill is slightly heaver duty than the Bridgeport. So it comes down to how practical it is to upgrade the Beaver mill.

I managed to get the machine tool tech's from work to look at it a while back. Conclusion was that there is an issue in the Crusader unit. Symptoms were refusal to jog in any direction. Once the override relay was frigged (piece of wood to hold it closed) all 3 axis would traverse. However the X axis would 'stall' after a few millimeters.

I have stripped the unit and found no obvious poor soldered connections/loose connections. However to be honest the controller is ancient (cards are dated 1981), even if I get it working the link to send code to the machine is a parallel port, etc. In short I don't think it is worth making much effort with. From my limited experience with CNC it gets old very quickly typing in G code at a machine. I wan to be able to design in CAD (use atuoCAD), send to post processor and though to machine.

So to me an upgrade of the controller is the right way forward.

I have:

x and y & Z - SEM DC servo drives (MT30E4's). 1.1 NM stall torque, max rpm 3600, 72 volts. Appear to be fitted with a tacho (7.5 volt per 1000 rpm)

Drives - not sure - in a cabinet, assume Anilam units

Encoders(?? position indicators) - fitted 0.01mm accuracy

Already has ball screws

So as a newbie what would you do?

I like to do things 'properly'. So I think I want to do the following:
1/. New CNC control, PC based.
2/. I'd like to keep the current drives and servos, but be able to upgrade later if I had an issue.

So my request is what would you do/recommend as solutions?

Thanks,

Adrian