Lagun mill powered knee

[jjclear]

Last winter I got the CNC bug and started putting together a small setup. I purchased a HobbyCNC board and made up a power supply. I added these to a pair of stepper motor equipped slide tables and ended up with a working system. No one warned me how addictive this stuff was. A couple of months later I end up with a Lagun CNC mill. (SE-18836) The machine appears to be in great shape with little wear. The ways are hard chromed and it has 4 servos. (x,y, z & z?) The knee is powered as well as the quill, but not at the same time. I'm guessing you need to swap cables between the 2 z's, but when I tried it the knee would not move. Is there something in the controller that needs to be changed? I'd like to find an operating manual. I know Lagun is still in busniess, but I'm hoping someone here might have an old copy. It has a Bandit controller which I intended to replace with a PC and Mach 3, but it works fine the way it is so I'm not changing it.

J. Clear

[Ron111]

Sounds like a good project, I think that I would use mach 2 (or 3) and set up two different configuration files; one to drive the spindle z maybe for drilling and the knee zee when doing typical milling.

Anyway that's my nickels worth

Ron

[jjclear]

Ron,
I just saw your reply. I'm reading that the Bandit controls aren't the best, but while it's still working I'm not going to change it. Problem is that there is only 1 cable for the knee/quill so only one will work at a time. Right now since I'm still learning I need to keep things simple.

J.

[jjclear]

I've finally had some success. It's taken me a while, but I'm finally able to make some real parts with my mill. For a while, I just played around with a few small pieces, using MDI to input the code. Now I'm able to get my laptop to upload the code for me. So far the machine is running OK with the old controller. I had some problems due to the way the Bandit controller deals with arcs. I still can't figure that one out. So as a work around I just break up the arcs into line segments. The CAM program makes that pretty easy. Last night I loaded a program that ended up being 485 lines and everything worked great. I guess the next big thing will be to try and drip feed it off the laptop (due to Bandits 999 limitation) and start cutting in 3D. Oh yeah, I've got to figure out how to do tool offsets too. Right now it makes my head spin.
I still haven't figured out how to get the knee to move with the control, but the quill works fine.

J. Clear