Deckel NC prices have officially reached negative/zero territory in Germany

[Martin P]

On Kleinanzeigen a very late FP4NC D11 has shown up for 950€, not an "A" machine, with 4th axis.
Terrible pictures, states a control card needs to be replaced, no further info. Not real close, but not far either.
I was proud to refrain from acting, but caved to temptation and offered the guy 1500€ for all if I could part the machine out at his place, it would just be so much easier logisticly. He says that is not possible. OK.
A day passes and I get a notification that the prices has been lowered, now 790€. Ah the temptation. And why has nobody bought the thing yet? I must give luck a chance.
I contact the guy saying that my parting out offer stands, but that I could also pick it up, but due to the cost of this I am only offering 500€.
He accepts and we organize the details. I get the offer from FPS they received for a new NPC card (its always the NPC card): 2900€.
He has forklifts and stuff, there are no issues, except I will be overloaded some. Total weight is listed at 2700kg with fixed table (but has NC table).
So the plan is now to bring it home and set it up under the carport (no space anymore at all inside) to check actual condition. Is it garbage or not. It would be best if it is total garbage and totally worn out. Then I could part it out and get my 500€ back from the scrap yard and only get stuck with one fuel tank of Diesel.
Those NPC cards are a real problem. Since most machines eventually die because of them and they are so expensive, it would be interesting to know why they die. It is reasonable to assume it is always the same part or cause. Are there real professional experts specializing in this who could troubleshoot this? Might be worth it to spend some money there. I have several dead NPCs by now, also have a good one to fix this machine. But it be better if it is a worn out pile.

 

[Martin P]

Looked at the FPS quote again. With tax it is 3500€ for the card (incl. EPROMs in required SW level).
Also the quote is from November 2020. So the machine has been fermeting for a while.

 

[Martin P]

Recovered and it went real smooth.
The defective NPC card went missing during storage of the machine. Humorously FPS would now want 5800€ core charge.
Luckily I have spares, so I hope to make it run to see how worn it is.

 

[john.k]

Might be like my brothers adventures with another German household name .........replacement needed ,cost over $6000 ........brother says it must be fixable surely.........fixing is not permitted ,no fixing can be allowed, only new for old via an authorized dealer .......anyhoo,after much investigation ,its found the units are being processed in Hungary by the outlaw scrap electronics trade.............(my brother is a IT /medical electronics professional).

 

[neilho]

Just curious, what's the NPC card do?

 

[rimcanyon]

Martin, I seem to recall about a decade ago that there was someone in Europe who was re-engineering Deckel controls and planned to sell new parts or repair old ones. Don't recall the details, but I take it from your mention of FPS prices for NZP that there is no other source of supply for rebuilt Dialog control parts?

 

[Martin P]

There are many places that supply Dialog 11 cards. FPS is the go-to place for most companies simply because they are the legacy Deckel guys and do all the service. For electronics they are also the most expensive. This way they are now significantly contributing in killing off these old machine.
With all the many card suppliers the real question is: who ACTUALLY fixes them? Most guys are go-betweens and just add their 100%. There is a compnay called CES that actually seems to do work on these cards, but I cannot find them yet.
There are also guys that will sell you a card promising functionality without actually knowing. The whole sceen is like the used car market, some good, some bad, some criminals.
The NPC is called the PLC Processor Card. It contains memory, EPROMS and a processor. It contains the PLC EPROMs and communicates with other cards (NSI on onwards) through a VME Bus.
I'd love to find a real expert and pay him to find the actual error on the NPC card as it seems likely that its normally the same thing to go wrong each time. There are suspicions. Oliver from this forum has already invested quite some time into this.

 

[thanvg]

There are many places that supply Dialog 11 cards. FPS is the go-to place for most companies simply because they are the legacy Deckel guys and do all the service. For electronics they are also the most expensive. This way they are now significantly contributing in killing off these old machine.
With all the many card suppliers the real question is: who ACTUALLY fixes them? Most guys are go-betweens and just add their 100%. There is a compnay called CES that actually seems to do work on these cards, but I cannot find them yet.
There are also guys that will sell you a card promising functionality without actually knowing. The whole sceen is like the used car market, some good, some bad, some criminals.
The NPC is called the PLC Processor Card. It contains memory, EPROMS and a processor. It contains the PLC EPROMs and communicates with other cards (NSI on onwards) through a VME Bus.
I'd love to find a real expert and pay him to find the actual error on the NPC card as it seems likely that its normally the same thing to go wrong each time. There are suspicions. Oliver from this forum has already invested quite some time into this.

Appreciating the approach, even though I have nothing to do with NC deckels. If you secure a service path, you'll save many of these machines. As far as I can understand, these machines can be found in decent condition (auto lube plays its part here) and would interest many people if it wasn't for the electronics risk.

BR,
Thanos

 

[???]

Martin you need someone with a Huntron, they will be able to compare a working board to a faulty board. Industries that work with really high end expensive equipment that is not upgraded and thrown away are a good place to find really knowledgeable board level repair people. The motion picture camera industry used to be such an industry. Unfortunately the Russians who are really next level at this type of work are no longer available. Good luck.

 

[Milacron]

I'd love to find a real expert and pay him to find the actual error on the NPC card as it seems likely that its normally the same thing to go wrong each time. There are suspicions. Oliver from this forum has already invested quite some time into this.

I'm not a real expert, but in my case the NPC component failure was one of the static rom IC's. I "knew" this only because I had checked every other component that was checkable by conventional means and the 18 static rom chips were the only components that required an IC tester to test (I used a BK Precision 575 digital IC tester). The catch is the NPC board in question has 18 identical static rom chips with 20 legs each, thus 360 chip legs to desolder !

The easiest/safest way to do this is clip each leg with cutters and desolder the individual legs. But then you can't test the IC's and you might as well desolder all 360 legs, install eighteen 20 pin sockets and insert all new chips and hope for the best.

In my case my curiosity was such that I wanted to see with my own eyes which chip was bad, so I developed desolder techniques where I could remove each static rom IC complete, thus allowing for insert into the BK tester. Was hoping the defective chip was one of the first ones I picked but it turned out to be the 14th chip, so on the theory there might be a second one bad I forged ahead and removed/tested them all. Just the one bad. End result was a working D11.

 

[Milacron]

Martin you need someone with a Huntron, they will be able to compare a working board to a faulty board. Industries that work with really high end expensive equipment that is not upgraded and thrown away are a good place to find really knowledgeable board level repair people. The motion picture camera industry used to be such an industry. Unfortunately the Russians who are really next level at this type of work are no longer available. Good luck.

I have a Huntron Tracker and it is useful for comparing component signatures on it's small O scope screen, but is not useful for checking IC's since one board might have an IC leg at 1 state, and the other board the same leg might be at 0.... which is perfectly normal and thus not an indicator of a failed component.

 

[Martin P]

Don, I did not remember you having issues with the NPC card and yes, the RAM is the suspect. You have been tennacious in fixing your stuff. If these RAM chips can go bad and there are so many, the mean time between failure is obviously bad. Still the price FPS (and others) want to fix them I cannot correlate to the effort/parts cost. I guess I am naive to assume a relationship between effort and price.

I have unloaded the FP4NC D11:

 

[amaranth]

Static RAM or ROM chips? RAM is easy, just replace, ROMs are a bit more difficult

One of the trials of working with 70-80s electronic test equipment is "rom rot" where the proms degrade and eventually loose their contents (some semiconductor manufacturers are particularly notorious for this). Most of this equipment is long unsupported from the manufacturer (if they exist) so the community has several sites to store firmware images. It seems like something like that would be useful for old iron. The problem is you need to remove the chips and run them through a reader to dump the contents which is not something a typical machinist is likely to be familiar with. As Milicron pointed out, desoldering the chips is a task that requires some specialized equipment and expertise. Still, any decent electronics tech can do it.

This is the kind of thing that has no value until you have a dead machine and are at the hands of a monopolist who's going to make you think seriously about scrapping a machine that could be fixed with five dollars worth of parts and ten minutes of electronics work. Well, maybe a bit more; if one ROM is failing you probably want to replace them all, but that's the general idea.

 

[Martin P]

Just a little update, the control is running as of right now, but I still have to load the parameters (did not have on me).
In the end it just needed an NPC card. This was complicated since I had put in a new NSV card (power supply), which did not charge the batteries. Once I noticed that this morning I could put the original NSV back in and it booted right up.

 

[Martin P]

One more update.
I loaded the parameters and tried to start the machine, getting an error message relating to motor switches. This prompted the NSV card to open the emercency chain (little relay on the board). I cycled the large power fuses and all was good (this never worked before).
I could now start the machine and reference the axis. All very smooth. The 4th axis references at an odd angle, but I see there is a parameter for this which is set at a weird number.
I ran the spindle and it sounds very disturbing at certain speeds. This may be a matter of getting used to, but I need to check the oil to make sure. Also the speed changes are not fully variable, but happen in small increments. These increments hit very hard, like hard jerks for each increment. But again there are adjustable parameters for this (spindles ramp up speeds and shapes).
When I press the softkey for the lube cycle the monitor (flat screen) will go black for a moment and looks for the RGB signal. WTF?
Also the monitor has a poor picture. Possibly a capacitor on the way out.

I have the service records for the machine and in 2001 a guy from FPS noted on a work order:
"Strong galling on the ways of the y and x axis. Too wide to be repaired at the customer location. Machine must be overhauled."

When flipping the head back and looking at the front of the y-axis, I noted the surface is scraped, not ground as it should be.
Looking at the way surfaces on their full length they look perfect to me. I presume the machine did get overhauled. I have to see if FPS has this on record.

Anyway, lookes like these 500€ were well spent. Scrapping would be more beneficial for my space problem, but I think this will not happen.

 

[Colt45]

Don't know anything about D11, but re the NCT table-
On D4, the rotary "home position" is set by slipping the limit switch cam inside the rotary table after indicating the T-slots parallel to the desired axis.
Requires some trial and error.

 

[Martin P]

Interesting. I'll check that out. Thanks.

 

[Mud]

On D4, the rotary "home position" is set by slipping the limit switch cam inside the rotary table after indicating the T-slots parallel to the desired axis.

That there are parameters is interesting. On my D4 the switch and cam are not adjustable. They get it close then I align the table slots by rotating the body of the encoder located on the end of the worm, DD said that is the way. It could easily be completely different from yours, it's an FP7NC.

 

[Martin P]

There are more parameters then you can shake a stick at. These are just the axis ones.
Here xx011 is the Ref point shift:

 

[Mud]

Is that for D11?