Hi All,

I picked up one of these today and plan to get it running for hobby stuff.

I will post some pics during the week but it looks pretty much unused and came with 2 original manuals, bbc computer, control box, monitor, 5 1/4 floppies etc. I don't need to do anything particularly exciting with it and it will probably live at the school I teach at as a training / demo machine only. I do want to be able to cut threads.

Last year I built a cnc plasma using axbbe board and uccnc control software so I have some knowledge although it's fair to say I am good at following instructions rather than fully understanding the electronic principles behind it all.

I want to get this running off of modern software though and ideally (similar to how I run our cnc mill and my plasma) produce code in Fusion 360.

Ideally I also want to be able to use this machine semi-manually, i;e control spindle speed and axis movements from switches.

The spindle motor is a 0.37kw GEC 180v dc motor (I assume original).

My initial thoughts are to use a chinese 400w panel mounted motor controller for speed, and a couple of Nema 23 closed loop steppers for the axes. One thing I am not clear on is whether the spindle needs to be controlled? I appreciate it needs to provide accurate speed via the optical encoder for screwcutting but is that information used to position the axis or also to tweak spindle speed?
I like the axbbe motion controller that I used on the plasma but it is quite expensive - I wanted an ethernet controller on the plasma because of the interference issues from the plasma with usb. I assume this isn't such a problem with a cnc lathe? Can I get away with a cheap chinese usb controller?

Very interested in peoples thoughts on this project. I see a few people on here have got these little machines going so any advice greatly appreciated!

Cheers