Long post warning......you've been warned.
Thanks for the ideas Ed. btw, I used you as a referrer when I signed up on cnczone.com. I was only up until about 3am last night doing research on this machine. The thing just fascinates me.
I got quite lucky on the Hurco today. I talked to the owners a bit and they were able to give me a couple things that I think are very useful. The first thing they gave me was the info that the machine could only be programmed to .001" so that tells me it must be a B model controller. The next thing they gave me just totally amazed me. They dug in a drawer and came up with not one, but two full copies of the operator manual. Both copies have all the chapters.
They've owned the machine for 12-13 years and it was operational until not long ago when they moved to a larger facility about a mile from where they were.
One of the owners said he was quite interested in getting the machine operational. The other, who knows more about the machine side of things, said the ways were tight, the motors quiet, and there was little to no backlash in the machine. I was incorrect in my original thinking that no one in the shop knew how to do anything with the machine. The guy who used to run the machine said it used to do just fine but near the end it was having a hard time reliably reading the master from the tape, big surprise.
I searched all over the machine and didn't find any military or other sort of round connectors, covered or otherwise. I don't know if it has them at all. The machine does have a 13-place tool changer. The hour meter reads 40,xxx hours. I'll try and get some pics tomorrow.
I have yet to power up the machine and before I even attempt it I'm going to thoroughly clean the tape drive with alcohol and try to make sure the tape is as good and clean as I can get it.
I read a ton of stuff last night and I don't remember it all. The owner wants the machine to be operational and that will at the least require a tape emulator. I'll check around the various sites people have pointed me to in order to find one. If anyone has a least cost or best recommended way of doing that I'd be pleased to hear it. IIRC the master file only needs to be loaded at boot time and as long as it doesn't get turned off it
should just keep running. Best case scenario would be to
not need to have a dedicated DOS based PC to load the master. The shop already has serial lines run from their programming room to their other eight CNC capable machines and I'd like to just add another line to the setup. That way I could load the master file to the machine from one of their existing PC's. I'd settle for proof of concept boot from a DOS PC if it was much more expensive to go the other route. That way they could be sure the machine was working well enough to justify the further expense of the setup I described.
I believe the machine would be more useful to the shop if it were able to be programmed to .0001" and might propose that to them as an upgrade after getting it running. What's involved with getting it to do this? I assume it would be a complete controller retrofit/upgrade of some sort and I'm guessing there's probably different options for how to do it. I know, I know...talk to Shane, but I'd rather find out on my own if I can.
Ok, enough babbling,
Justin