[hudsonlighting]

Hi Guys,
I'll start with a little back ground as this is my first past here!

I purchased a new RoutoutCNC CNC router at the end of 2009 with a view to milling PCBs for production of lighting control gear and after allot of mistakes begen producing decent PCBs. I then sat down and created full 3d drawings in Autocad for the actual light fittings and sent those drawings to various cnc machine shops.
After getting several ridiculous quotes (£800 + for a garden light fitting) I decided to give it ago myself.
My light design is 86mm in diameter so I ideally needed at least 100mm to allow for any play. I looked at various different lathes and kept my eye out on various used machine sites and ebay of course and eventually decided I wanted either a Denford or Boxford Lathe as both seem to have extremely high quality components and generally come with little use as they are often used in schools.
I eventually came across a Denford Mirac in near perfect condition. The ball screws and ways are like new and its seems to have only ever machined small plastic parts. It was also a steal at £875.00 excl VAT and in fully working order.
The problem is that the electronics in this lathe only work with DOS software and it seems plenty of Mirac owners out there have tried to get the existing electronics to work with windows without any success (providing their machine is pre 1994) leaving the only route of converting with new drives to work with Mach3 or similar.
The new drives is probably going to be the easy bit. The hard bit is going to be getting the automatic tool changer to work and spindle controls.
There seems to be at least 2 people out there that have successfully done a conversion but unfortunately have not posted a build log so its hard to work what they have done to get their machines to work.

Anyway on with the build:

I have so far purchased 2 Gecko 201x Drives and also the C11G breakout board from CNC4PC.

I will be posting pictures and more information very soon.