Newbie- EZ TRAK SX

[jpboyt]

Greetings,
The Boss drug home a Bridgeport Series I with EZ-TRAK SX hanging on it. Machine, dated 1994, has a 386SX motherboard and a 31/2" floppy. No harddrive. Pendant stuff has DX on on it. I bought an SX maintenance manual and it shows a 286 processor. Machine repair guy across the street has DX manual and it shows a 486. Is this an SX or DX. Machine homes and seems to want to do stuff when I push keyboard menu items. Anyhoo, I'm not sure which programming manual to buy. The boot floppy is labeled: Backup 31943014; EZ-TRAK SX; 2.25/4.43. Is there a more recent version that is available? Suggestions welcome.

Pat Boyt

[machintek]

Way back then, the 386 was considered a SX type and only had a floppy. Hard drives came on the DX which came with the 486 processor. A machine of this age already had the CRT go out so it may have been replaced with a second hand DX unit.
Upgrading software is a crap-shoot on a 386 SX but I would not try anything newer than version 3.02.

George

[JoBwan]

jpboyt,
I have 2 or 3 E-Trak SX machines and on all of them, I have had to replace the complete computer in them. They do not have a hard drive, but do have what my technician calls "a computer module". Cost was appx. $1300.00 installed by my Bridgeport technician. The company I use is called DB-2 from Detroit area. It took him appx. 2 hours and I was up and running.

[mcmachine]

Wow yours are new compared to mine. It has a date of 1982. We have replaced the monitors on them twice but the computer works fine. I thought mine has a slower processor than 286. I will watch it tomorrow when it boots up.

[machintek]

Yours must be the ones with the SouthWestern control.

George

[jpboyt]

Thanks for the responses! I still need to know something about programming manuals. The CDs with programming manuals, that I've found, start at 5.? and I think I'm at 2.? Would these be close enough? I have another question about the tool changer. How do I tell if I have the Erickson #30 or the Universal #200 Kwik-switch sytem installed? The machine only came with a single keyless key chuck. The chuck has a pair of slots rather than lugs. It is tapped 1/2-13. I am also assuming that if a person wanted to go to an R-8 collet setup that a spindle change would be required. A side note: it would be nice to have a sticky posted that had a matrix of the years and models available. There seems to be a lot of these mills still in use.
Pat