Seeking advice on potential CNC knee mill retrofit candidates

[jimjovan]

I am currently looking at retrofitting either an early eighties Shizuoka ST-N with a broken Fanuc 6M b control or an early eighties Wells Index 762 with a working Bandit I servo controller.

For the Shizuoka with Fanuc control: Could someone give me some advice on the potential problems converting this to EMC2 control? Can the brush type fanuc servos and drives be reused/easily interfaced to? Does anyone have information on the servo motor specs (volts & amps). Also, what spindle drive/motor is used on this mill? The good thing is this mill takes CAT-40 tooling (cheaper).

For the Wells with Bandit control: The servos are brush type with resolvers. Could I re-use the drives or are they too troublesome? I'm guessing it would probably make more sense to start fresh and remove all of the Bandit stuff. Tooling this mill might be more expensive as the spindle takes kwik switch 200 tooling. The good thing about this mill is it looks like it hasn't seen too much use.

To keep costs low, I would like to re-use as much as possible. If I can keep the servo motors and drives as is, I won't have to do much as far as tuning goes and it should take less time to get up and running. That said, if it's more work than what it's worth, I have no problem installing different encoders and drives to make things more reliable.

I think both machines are basically well made and either would work well as a small prototype/production mill. I am thinking the Shizuoka is probably the better candidate, but I'm concerned about the Fanuc control. On the other hand, I could probably get some cash back parting out the Fanuc (I doubt there is much demand for old Bandit stuff).

All advice is accepted and any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Jim

[Al_The_Man]

I have the size rating of the Fanuc DC motors, what number are they, 5 ?
The drives have analogue control usually, but are most likely three phase SCR fed type.
Also the 6 can have either encoder or resolver also.
Al.

[jimjovan]

I'll have to get back to you on the Fanuc motors.

Have you or do you know anyone that was able to use the Fanuc drives with EMC2? It sounds like the Fanuc stuff (servo drives) needs 3 phase power to function.

I forgot to mention that I would like to convert either mill to single phase power with a VFD driving the spindle. That being the case, I would guess I would have to replace the drives on the Shizuoka.

[jimjovan]

The Fanuc motors are type ao6b-0613-b031, dc servo motor model O.

Would this be enough information to find out if they have encoders or resolvers?

The alarm given on the Shizuoka with 6M controls is a bubble memory alarm. The memory card was replaced, but it still gives the alarm.

Has anyone out there used EMC2 with these motors?