Need Help!- Two Bridgeport SeriesII machines down

[ronmarkum]

I need some help getting two machines up and running. I'm right in the middle of building a robot with 20 high school students for the FIRST competition and my mills went on break. Students with no machines to run is not a good thing.

Background:
Both of these machines see little use except during robot build season (January - March). The rest of the time they may have 4 hours use per month if that much. I started readying the machines in December when I noticed the problems.

Machine 1 is a Bridgeport Series II Interact2 with a Heidenhain 151 control.
Machine 2 is a Series 11 Interact4 with a 150 control.

Problems, Machine 1
The original problem was the monitor VDU would not come on and I could not get the machine to go through the normal start up sequence...CE...Start x 6...
After searching this forum and the downloaded service manuals I determined the problem was with the CLP board. I happened to have a spare and replaced the board and now the monitor works. During replacement, I pulled all the slide in cards in the control (except the memory card so I would not loose the parameters) to make sure they were well seated. When I powered on the machine (a couple weeks ago) I saw the following.
A few seconds after power on, the text MEMORY TEST appeared.
A few seconds after that the red lights on the front panel came on.
After a few seconds the top row on the VDU filled with BBBBBBB characters.
Then the POWER INTERRUPTED message appeared and could not clear with CE. The machine is frozen in that state. Can't CE or enable the DC power button. This morning when I went to power on, all I got on the VDU was vertical characters like this | in place of the letters. (Memory test looks like this |||||| ||||) Still cant CE or enable DC power.
Any ideals on what could be causing this?

Machine 2
The x drive axis board went bad (no green lights). Replaced the board with a spare and went through the tuning procedures for the board. X axis now moves. But not as smoothly as before but manageable. Two other problems have developed. One, when the x or y is moved by the joystick they go way to fast and result in a Position Error that can be cleared with CE. The hand wheel works but is very slow and I can't enter any value lower than 4 for its factor. The second problem is I can't transfer programs or parameters from the computer to the machine as in the past. I can transfer a small program from the machine to the computer (so i have communication) but not from the computer to the machine. (using TNCREMO)
Help!

Sorry for the long post but I though I would get it all out there for you to see.

Thanks
Ron

[gridley51]

Machine one sounds as though the boards are not correctly seated.Can sometimes be difficult to get them in correctly.There is a manual on Heidenhain.com which explains the fault according to the letter or number the screen is covered with.
Machine two sounds as though drive card is faulty/not set up correctly.Also seems to have parameter problems,but,if you have not touched them?

[ronmarkum]

Thanks for the reply. I'll recheck my boards and let you know if that helps. If you have any other suggestions, I'd like to hear them.

Thanks
Ron

[Dar]

i have a bp 2 and had a similar problem wouldn,t take a program untill i powered down and shut pc off when i turned both on again it would take the program. good luck.if my machine doesn,t take a program i cant just clear it .both have to be shut down completly.