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What is everyone going to do when the deckel or maho control dies?

toolnuts

Cast Iron
Joined
Sep 27, 2009
Location
washington
Hi all,

I was wondering what this community of Euro mill owners
will do when their controllers die?

Will you try to get it fixed or opt for a retrofit?

The only retrofit that I've heard about is from Dr. Deckel,
and it's not cheap.

Most of your machines are getting older and have a limited
time left. I had an older machine, out of the 80's that died
15 plus years ago. I sold it because I didn't think it was
worth the effort to fix it.

Will you try to do a refit on your own?

I was thinking that I would try to do a retrofit and make
the information available, on how to do it, to this community.

I know Ross has thought about it because he has replaced one
axis as a test to see how it would work.

I think the simplest retrofit would utilize most of the existing
components - servos, tachometer, servo amplifier, and wiring.

As those components are analog, they are of more performance
than the controller - put in a new controller and your performance
will be greatly enhanced.

I think the Centroid control would be a good candidate control.
They are reasonably priced and the documentation is good.

I'm sure there are other good candidates that I don't know about.

Once you get away from using most of the original components
the cost goes up accordingly. You could go to AC servos, but then
you would need new servo amplifiers, ....etc.

Just some thoughts.

What are your thoughts?

Paul
 
Simply, don't buy a CNC if you don't have any experience with electronics, don't want to learn and can't afford to pay someone to fix the machine for you.

I fiddled with (mostly analog) electronics probably for 10-15 years before I bought my first broken CNC and I got it working with no external help after a year or so. Now I have a working Maho, a working FP4NC and and a worn out FP2NC that I'm currently rebuilding.

So far I found that fixing mechanical problems and wear is much harder work than finding and replacing broken parts. If you can get 2 machines with identical control, finding broken parts gets like a magnitude more simple because you can swap PCB boards to narrow down the problem. Once the bad PCB is found, you can use the working one to compare signals and voltages with, as reference.

And retrofitting a machine is no simple task, at least compared to finding and repairing some minor faults on a 30year old CNC controller (electronics was much more repairable back in those days, compared to today).
 
There's been quite a few discussions of deckel retrofitting here on PM, have you reviewed those?

I expect my Dialog 4 on my FP7nc to outlast me. I'm pretty pessimistic about old electronics in general and CNCs in particular, but the Dialogs have quite a few folks repairing them and quite a few more enthusiastic users in industry to keep those repair folks working. A proper retrofit is no simple matter, I'd rather keep mine going as is, plus the 7 is a different animal from the smaller machines, so it would be a new project for a retrofitter to tackle. I don't have cash to spend on having the ultimate control for a machine that isn't a major producer in my company, I have to justify the expense as productive. I also have a FP4NC with a Siemens 3M. My solution there was to buy a complete parts machine for the control spares. Yes that's a zero sum game because you eventually run out of parts machines and you don't get any improved functionality, but it has the advantage of being simple and cheap. I had my eye on a FP4NC with a Dynapath Delta 20 control because Dynapath tells me they will reverse engineer the BIOS from an old control and supply a new modern plug and play control to install on an existing machine as an upgrade(and I like Dynapath as a company). I don't know if that's true of the Deckel versions, but it's a nice thing to ponder. If it was done once, perhaps that that control could then be fit to other Deckels that had other controls from new.
 
Fix it. Own two machines with same control...makes night and day difference for trouble shoot purposes via swapping suspect boards.
 








 
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