Ya I would say I got about 4 months of time invested and about 10k so far. I was no master electrician when I started this there was quite a learning curve to take on a task like this. I didn't work on the machine for awhile due to some personal reasons in my life but recently took it back up and plan to see it to completion and start getting some of that cash invested back out of it
. Or that is the plan anyhow! If I could give advice to someone trying to recreate this I would first and foremost inspect the ball screws of whatever machine your getting(if this is possible under your situation) I love the Teco servo drives. I'd recommend them to anyone. Make sure you don't ever tap on the back of the servo motor. Like when your putting pulleys on
. I completely changed the breakout board(to CNC4PC's C32 CNC Board) and most of the control components in the back to get some noise immunity and reliable stuff that was more easily replaced. By this I mean using the previous boards I had to build a line driver board so the breakout board could speak to the servo with noise immunity from using the 2 wires versus the singled ended wire coming from the breakout board. I also learned that actually grounding the shielded cables is super important and having a good ground near the machine is nearly essential IMO. I would also suggest for a possible retrofit project that you buy some new wires for all your devices to be hooked up. As in kind of plan what gauge wires your going to need and order some reels of shielded cable in the correct sizes that you'll need. I dug through and reused a lot of the older wires but it would have looked more professional and uniform had I done that. The servo drives and VFD have a descent book to go with and to a first timer this can seem overwhelming but you just got to take the time to read through see what options you have and get them set correctly for your situation(parameters and such). I ran a Haas at my work so I decided to figure out the keypad matrix on Haas keypad. Just so I could bring the Haas feel back to home. If any1 would like the matrix table I'll put it in an excel sheet. I'll try to take some new picture of the back cabinet as well and post it up tmrw. I read through JHChopper's retrofit and try to closely mimic what he had done. A big thanks goes to him as well or I wouldn't have felt at ease at trying to retrofit this. I have a video of it cutting I'll post up. This was it's second test piece so I had pretty slow feed rates especially on the plunge. As my confidence in the machine increases I'll move to a more productive level. Happy Holidays