Hi Mark, I have not seen any of the controls of that era for about 20 years. No doubt there may be a few in museums.
When I started with Ferranti, they had just introduced their all transistor SCOPE point to point control (Specifiable Co-ordinate Positioning Equipment} & I was given a manual (full of errors) to study & a control to play with. Most of the engineers were out on site trying to get the first manufactured batch to work. Part way through my third week, I was put on a Vanguard from Turnhouse to Heathrow with a couple of spare circuit boards on route for Marley Tiles near Maidstone to meet up with a slightly more experienced engineer who was having trouble with the Mecof. The other engineer was asked to move on to another job at the end of that day leaving me up to hold the baby. Seemed to make a good impression though as the Elgar rep. tried to get me to work for them on my next visit.
In those days, the control systems were by no means plug & play. It was not unusual to spend 8-10 weeks on site sorting out design shortcomings before the machines would operate anywhere near satisfactorily. About a year after that, it was decided that the circuit switching parameters were too marginal & so all controls were retrofitted with modified printed circuit boards (about 80 boards per system) & re-comissioned. The same thing happened when a similar control was supplied to BSA for their first 50 Batchmatics that additionally wanted wiring modifications. I had a retrofit team of 3 working with me going round the 20 or more machines already supplied to customers. Neither did it end there, this was repeated through into the 70's first with integrated circuits through to microprocessor based systems.
Undercapitalisation on desigh & development probably played a major part in the above together with pressure to ship systems before they were ready.
They had for some time been making continuous path systems for the aerospace industry using 1/4" 4 track magnetic tape with the 3 control tracks for the axes phase modulated with respect to the master track. The tqpes had to be produced by Ferranti from the customer's drawings, although, the aircraft industry set up their own facility later (possibly Hatfield).
I have in front me a Machinery Publishing Company yellow book No49 1965 ""Numerical Control Systems for Automatic Operation of Machine Tools that illustrates these controls. Unfortunately, I dumped all documentation long ago.
I beleive that there was a forerunner to the SCOPE made in small numbers.
When I started with Ferranti, I was told that I would be working in the English Midlands. The engineer's coordinator in Dalkeith had a tiny map of the British Isles on the wall & when I complained of the area I was covering, he told meit was only an inch on his map.
The nc division of Ferranti was transferred to Plessey in 1970.
Tyrone,
I am not too familiar with earlier machines, but I seem to recollect seeing Elgamills on my travels with DROs if I remember correctly. Don't know how the axis feed was arranged.
The 1966 machine did have Mecof badging & the Ferranti drawings were marked Mecof, but on reflection I cannot rule out that there was also an Elgamill badge added either before or after my first visit as several of Elgar's potential customers were shown the machine. For all I know it may have been the original.
Don
