As a point of general interest, I wanted to tell you all a little bit about a retrofit I completed last year. This is perhaps a little bit more expensive than the typical hobbyist would discuss, but as far as I am concerned, my machining business is just a "hobby gone wild" anyway
10 years ago I bought a Graziano lathe that was already retrofitted with a Bandit 1 controller. This was my very first escapade into cnc.
That controller was old when I bought it and I managed to resusitate it several times, but I finally bit the bullet and decided to redo the control with a PC based CNC called CNC Professional from CamSoftCorp.
This was quite the undertaking for me, as I live in a rural community in north-eastern Saskatchewan (Canada) and there is no technical help available in this community. I am the cnc guru here, I guess
Anyways, I got the rewiring done, I reused the existing servo motors, I simply replaced the X axis encoder with a high precision Sony magnescale ( .00005" resolution) to improve the positioning accuracy. The precision required on the X axis is much higher than Z of course, so I thought this would save me some money, just souping up the X axis.
The software I first started out with from CamsoftCorp was actually the cheaper version "CNC-Lite" they call it, but I later found that some of the features that I wanted to have required the more expensive CNC Professional package, so I upgraded.
I purchased a 3 axis 1832 Galil motion controller card and interconnect box from CamSoftcorp. I had an old 300mhz PC laying around which I used for the controller, I later upgraded that to an AMD 550 which is what it currently uses.
Then I got into writing logic for the user interface. Although their software packages ships in a "ready to run" state, it wasn't as safe or as foolproof as I wanted. The great thing about getting this PCbased cnc, is that I could rewrite and modify the graphical user interface to do whatever I wanted. This was a great treat for a tinkerer like me.
So I wrote logic and tested it at the machine off and on for about a year and a half, before I got everything close to perfection. I estimate I spent 500 hours on the project, but the results were worth it. I use the machine to this day, and I am very pleased with it. Best of all, it is fool-proof enough that it makes an excellent trainer lathe for a novice. I've designed every safety method I can think of into the logic, so its almost hard to make a mistake using it.