Nattering nabobs of negativism strike again !
So, you're sitting in the office and this beatup old pickup pulls in. Guy walks in, says, "Hey, I've got a fab shop two blocks away and noticed you have machines. We're doing an earthquake retro downtown and need 250 steel plates, 18 by 24 by an inch thick, needs ... umm, four and four, plus three on each end, fourteen 1" holes drilled and tapped and a big cutout in the middle. Can you do that ?"
You're looking at fifteen grand-ish of easy work. What do you do ?
1) Take the enclosure off one of the Kitamura Mycenters and plop a big subplate on, do it in two operations with 1/4" carbide end mills spinning 15,000 rpm, thread mill the holes.
2) Buy a new Okuma for $120,000
3) Tell him to go away, you don't need the money
4) Haul out that old Cincy, put a beginner-type young guy on it to hoist them plates up and down all day, and clear ten grand.
Let me see, which one makes sense ... yeah, paperweight.
I'm guessing that ElectroNick's boss made a different choice than you, Mr Ewsley ...
They are pretty fun to run, actually. And they do a good job at what they were meant for.
They were from the sixties ... I think my H40 was a '67 but they made them earlier than that, maybe back as far as 1962 ? And they continued but with an Acc 5 up to the early seventies ? The Acc5 was a more capable controller, pretty sure it could do linear interpolation at least
These were a pretty popular machine for retrofits up until the early eighties. A place called US Machine Tool Corp or something did a lot of them ... there was a vertical model with a five-station turret that was especially popular for retrofit. Made a good drilling machine, the table is big and they are built pretty beefy.
Another interesting thing about them is they had linear ways decades before anyone else. The ways are sort of round bars with a leg out the bottom, this was before the THK-style ways, but they moved fast and well for their day.
@ Electo - your tape emulator may be fine. It won't do anything until you tell it to run a tape. That had manual mode where you could drive the machine around and tape mode where you pushed Go and it Went. Not sure it even has a feed hold, the mechanical readers may not even have had a buffer ... but with the tape emulator, until you put it in tape mode and tell it to go, it won't do anything.
You could run the emulator under OS/2 if you're feeling brave. A better dos than dos