About 6 months ago I bought a second-hand CNC mill - a Wabeco machine. Similar in size, I guess, to the larger Sieg machines, give or take. Not as robust (not so much iron!) as my Warco VMC which I had been intending to convert to CNC, but it was the right price, came from someone just up the road, and meant that I wouldn't be spending a few months re-engineering the Warco. In fact, it's a more suitable machine for the sort of small fiddly stuff I generally work on, so a better bet for CNC in my workshop.

Essentially it was the Wabeco top-of-the-range machine with genuine Hiwin 25mm profile rails, ballscrews, counter-balanced spindle and motor assembly with 7500rpm spindle speed, BT30 spindle, PC, etc. However, although Wabeco do CNC versions of this, this one had been "converted" by a US company, with Clearpath servos, Ethernet SmoothStepper, and Mach3 running a custom screenset. 3D touch probe (cheap and cheerful but it works), tool height setter, and all the macros to make that lot work - well, after a bit of tweaking by me, including discovery of undocumented Mach3 functions. And once I had the software side sorted, it all worked fine, including with my existing wireless MPG.

Well, most of the time it worked. I have had a series of Mach3 crashes, mainly to do with the ESS, I believe. Internal ESS error, out of data, and similar. I never actually broke a tool but did have to write off the odd workpiece that was halfway through and where I couldn't pick up reference coordinates again. No idea if it was ESS, Mach3, or some combination of the two but I decided that a brain transplant was the way forwards.

Master plan - replace ESS with UC300ETH and Mach3 with UCCNC. No issues about BOBs as that functionality already existed in the control box. What could possbily go wrong?

More in next post...