Oldest running CNC or NC machine

I was re reading some older posts and wondering what the oldest running NC or CNC machine is out there. I ran an old Giddings and Lewis Numeri - Center NC machining center a while ago that still had an air tape reader on it. It was a huge machine (over 100 " x travel) but very unreliable. I know the service tech made more money on it than the shop that owned it. Anyway, whats your oldest (has to be running) NC or CNC machine. Make and model number please. This ought to bring back memories. Pictures would be nice. No prize, just bragging rights. Retrofits don't count. Got to be original.

great idea......heres mine, 1985 Emco Maier F1P (production version of thier F1 training machine,have one of those also).I bought this DOA and have been restoring it over the years, just got it moving the axis and spindle over the winter months,that was a good day.Replaced stepper board, crt, control pad,stepper etc. ...must have suffered a voltage spike? .3 axis contour ,desktop, machine right out of the box...in 1985?, 12mm precision ground ballscrews, "closed loop" 5 phase steppers,2hp 4k rpm prog. spindle,232 comm, 10k lines of code, full list of g&m codes,rigid tap etc. ,30 taper, 99 tool memory ,ballscrew operated auto vise, emco/fanuc programming.A very well built little desktop beastie for the garage.....seems rather advanced for the time period

I have a 1984 Matsuura mc500v2 that was running daily production (7 days a week, 10-16 hour days) until about 3 months ago. Still works fine.

I use to work for Federal Premium Ammunition. They are still running a 1977 Okuma LC30 lathe. Hegman machine say's it's the oldest known still in operation in the USA. Word has it they cant find parts anymore and are looking to dump it. They will farm out everything it still tries to run.

OKK MCV410 1983. Still works like new.

Someone in town has a Brown and Sharpe 100VC machining center.
It was my old machine. The Old Bendix A5M control on it.
Everything works perfect. Tool changer works perfect.. Thrust bearings and spindle bearings are all in great shape... Control works perfect...
1984 vintage.

Possibly one of the few running Bendix A5 controls.
It will likely get scrapped..

Sure glad I didn't buy that thing new!

The System 10 was 5x the control that the 5 was, and I had one of those on an '85.

I don't have enything older than '90 that is all original. But I have 4 that date from 1983/4 back to 1971/2 that have been refitted.



-------------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

I guess that what they called Capital Equipment back then, instead of throw
away equipment.

Still have two Blue BX Hurcos 1980 vintage. I still love 'em, but I'm semi retired too,
so I can.

Best regards,

Stan-

Lets get really old here.
Is anyone still running a GE Mark Century C100 control?
I saw one in Cleveland a few months back on a big brute of a lathe still making chips. It had a Numatronics BTR on it.
I started NC maintenance in '73 and they were old then.

Bill

I have a shizouka ans with a bandit controll it is 1978 and it still works as long as I dont open the box with all the wires in it.

I can not tell you about the oldest running CNC machine, but I can tell you the first time a CNC control was ever shown here in the US.
I worked for Swedish Machine Tool (SMT) and in 1973 they sent us a new control for the Cincinnati Machine Tool Show.
It was a CNC control and it was fantastic.
You could actually write a program into its memory and if it did not work, you could do a thing called Editing, meaning fix your mistakes.
By 1974 we had a 50HP lathe running in the Chicago Show, every Japanese person in the show stopped at our booth to take pictures.
I remenber we had the only CNC lathe in the show that did not stop working, we made parts all through the show.
It was almost impossible to program , but it worked.
To give you an idea how tough it was:
Imagine a 3" diameter:
Add 1.5(the radius) + 5.637(the distance from the tool tip to the turret center), to get the X dimension.
The rear turret was more difficult, if possible.
Fortunately they came up with a better system in Sweden and we sold a lot of machines for really big prices.
Once the Japanese machines came here, read Mori-Seiki, at way lower prices, less than half of ours, we folded.
I had seen the light earlier and learned Fanuc and have been training shops on Fanuc ever since.
Need help, let me know, I travel very little, but still help anyone that needs help.
Heinz Putz.

Over the course of the 70's the computer & digital technology used in CNCs evolved rapidly from expensive lab curiosities to (expensive) robust industrial gear. And CNC tended to lag "real" computers by a few years.

I think the first CNC controls made from the mainstream 8-bit microprocessors and capable of running modern G code hit the market in the late 70's.

Earlier generation CNCs would have used too much weird stuff that broke and became unobtanium 25 years ago and caused the controls to be scrapped long ago.

hitandmiss said:

Lets get really old here.
Is anyone still running a GE Mark Century C100 control?
I saw one in Cleveland a few months back on a big brute of a lathe still making chips. It had a Numatronics BTR on it.
I started NC maintenance in '73 and they were old then.

Bill

Click to expand...

That's a throwback for me, for sure. I was working at the now-defunct Berlyn Corp in 1981 and they bought a LeBlond Tape Turn II equipped with the GE Mark Century 100S control. It was 100% incremental (point-to-point) programming. I tried every code known to man, there was just NO WAY to program in absolute coordinates!

The control had been fitted with the Numeratronics memory/edit unit. The machine (I was told) came out of the Whitin Machine Works of Whinsville MA where they made looms.

You'd type up the program as you punched tape on a Flexowriter, load it into the tape reader, and transfer to the memory/edit unit, and step through it with no stock to verify. If the total X-Z movements didn't add up to perfect round trip, then only the first piece was good and the rest got progressively out-of-tolerance. Don't ask how I know.

The machine's spindle was driven by a huge eddy-current coupling type of drive. It could not run in reverse under that drive, but had a separate DC "threading motor" that could run either direction. The threading motor did NOT have enough power to drive the 1"-8 NC taps I had to use, so what I learned to do for tapping (tension-compression head) was to run the tap in on main spindle, stop the spindle, begin a fast feed move in Z+ to pre-load the tension, and start the threading motor in reverse (G9), stop it once the tap was out of the hole it and restart the main. I was so proud of my ingenuity that I still remember every detail 30 years later...but I couldn't tell you what I have for breakfast today.

Those were heady days. That LeBland was so well-built that it would not surprise me to find it still running somewhere today, hopefully with a new control on it.

I don't have any old ones myself, but one place I worked at had 3 Moog Hydropoints. Air readers with looped tape that you had to splice together.

Another place I worked at part time had some old warner and swasey cnc lathes. I believe they were around 1970's vintage. Weird, they supposedly ran without ballscrews and ran off of transmission fluid? I believed that at the time, but sounds kinda silly now. I'm gonna take a look and find out.

Found a video of a warner swasey. These were slow, but what a massive beast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDAqUi-QWyo

We've gotten rid of all of our dinosaurs. We used to have a bunch of early/mid 80's machines with Siemens PRIMO controls (Single line, 16 character LED display - was fun to program when you can only read part of one line.....) Also had an old 3-headed tape reader Bridgeport...POS had a mind of it's own....and the tape reader was crap too...
Another place I worked had an old Burgmaster with a IIRC GE500 w/tape reader on it....it was a mind-loosing POS too....I can't count the number of 1-1/4" reamers it's snapped off and thrown at me when it lost it's mind and decided Z- actually meant Y+. I don't remember those days fondly....

Cincinnati Milacron 5 Axis Profiler with Big Blue control, vintage 1976 - still running every day.

DING DING DING we have a winner!

Joe

One Okuma LC-30, three LC-20s, and one LB-15 with 5000L control...not sure of exact year but pre 1985 (may be '82?). The LC-30 is the beauty of em all...holds size from start up to end of day on two shifts. The LC-20s are great, too, but the axis drive motors need to have the commutator and brushes removed and cleaned every couple months.
All of them have BTR cards for DNC communication.

I think that 10 years ago you would still be seeing much much older NC stuff in everyday production. 60s era stuff not un heard of, and probably bigger stuff.

hitandmiss said:

Lets get really old here.
Is anyone still running a GE Mark Century C100 control?
I saw one in Cleveland a few months back on a big brute of a lathe still making chips. It had a Numatronics BTR on it.
I started NC maintenance in '73 and they were old then.

Bill

Click to expand...

I'd like to see a pic of one of those.

I bet it's the same control that we had on an old B&S 3 axis mill at my last job. (23 yrs ago) Had to of ben from the 60's!

I changed a few parfts on it, and giv'r a tonk with a dead blow hammer to jostle the resolver occassionally, but I never programmed it.


-------------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox