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New/used cnc knee mill need advice

mxboy349

Aluminum
Joined
Aug 26, 2005
Location
St. Louis, MO
Just got this home. Nice knee mill with low hours.

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The problem, control is dead. The previous owner tells me the CRT is bad and from what I can tell he is right. The advice I need is do I sink money into fixing the control? From what I have read is that an Anilam Crusader M is like a bottomless pit you just throw money in. Should I consider an Ajax Retrofit? Ajax seems nice but it will be streching my budget. I was thinking about geckos and Mach3, but the geckos will only pull 80v servos, these are 140v. Maybe Rutex and Mach3? I am not an electronics wizard, but I am capable of learning. I would just like to hear some opinions on which way to go.

Thanks,
Eric
 
Nice looking machine, looks like a Lagun or Clausing, Meehanite casting. I like the way the axies are setup much better than on my Clausing TRAK AGE.
I'm looking at retro for another machine- (Maho horiz/vert, with no support on control)-looking at Fagor, and mdsi
Looks like I might be able to use existing ballscrews and motors.

On an old anilam I could have owned (NOS- never installed) -some parts unavailable, some things unsupported- big charge for telephone support. They wanted to sell me their newer model -new motors, screws, whole nine yards.

You should spend some time trying to figure out what's wrong, it maybe something simple. Be careful you don't spend more $$ than a possibly better control would cost before rebuilding the whole thing.

Sam
 
Doug, I think that much of the negative comments are about the Centroid lathe conversions (or someone's interactions with the company or a dealer), and that in general the Centroid/Ajax mill controls get reasonably positive comments.

At least that is my impression. But that could just be confirmation bias on my part.

cheers,
Michael
 
Skip the geckos. You have perfectly good servo amps in there, no since wasting them. I should be bringing home my Supermax in a couple days and I am in a similar situation as you. What I am going to do is use these Pixie boards (HTTP;//www.skyko.com) these interface your servo amps in the big box on your machine with an encoder giving you step/dir control of the servos just like the geckos you could have bought. Best of all, only $69 per axis!

I also ordered the C6 variable speed control card and c10 bidirectiona breakout boards. The C6 will allow me to control my VFD from Mach3 and the C10 boards are the inerfaces to the parallel ports. These are from http://www.cnc4pc.com

but first open up your control. See if you have power to the CRT. See how many wires go to the CRT, it jut may be a generic open frame TTL monochrome CRT and those are cheap.
 
If it truely only needs a CRT, you can probably swap it with a standard computer moniter, albeit you might have to relocate the CRT since it will be too large to fit the control. Most CNC's use a standard VGA interface, even if the connector is slightly different. And who doesn't have a spare 14" monitor laying around from 10 years ago? ;) People can't give those old moniters away.

What do you have to loose in trying it? Toss in a screen, run it till it's dead, and worry about it then. Who knows, it might last you 2 or 3 years before something else goes on it.
 
Rarely are screens that small VGA. If it is color it is TTL and if it color it is something like CGA. Both kinds of open frame monitors are available on the surplus market.

I might even have one available when i start tearing apart my controls.
 
If its just the monitor that's dead you should be able to take the manual and use it to key in some commands and make things happen. The manual will probably be necessary to have the proper power up sequence prior to the control being able to execute any commands. If you go thru that drill and it won't do anything, then a retrofit would seem to make sense. If it works, and only needs a monitor, then I'd suggest replacing the monitor and running it till something croaks terminally.
 
Looks like it has linear encoders? Looks like baldor brush type motors. Can you post a pic of inside the cabinet? The motor drives might be fine. As said before you might get by with pixie boards.
 
And as soon as there is a new firmware revision for Geckodrives G100 G-Rex I will add that to my system. It is basically a pulse generator that connects to your computer via ethernet or USB. Has 6 axis of control at I think up to 1.5mhz pulse rate on each. No more worrying about CPU loads on your PC bogging down parallel port performance. (45khz max)
 
Thanks for the advice guys. So far I have the machine under power and I can jog axis with no display. I have pulled the monitor out and I am going to see if I can get it repaired. Here is a picture of the board that controls the monitor. I am not expert but I think the red circled area is no good.....

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The machine is in excellent shape, only 3400 hours on the clock. I will keep everyone informed on my progress.

Thanks,
Eric
 
Thanks for the advice all. I found a monitor repair shop in Washington, here is the link if anyone is interested CNC Repair . Very nice people and they turned this around quick. $400 later and I now have a working cnc mill. Again thanks for the advice. Here are some pics.

Enjoy,
Eric

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