Tree 325 value

[Michael M]

I've only made a few posts at chopperweb and that was a while back so I wouldn't expect you to have recognized me, especially since I had to truncate my full name to get it into the username field here.

You'll also find a moderate number of posts from different Tree 325 owners over in the CNC forum at Practical Machinist.

http://www.eurospares.com/mills.htm

has a Tree brochure that covers the 325 and also shows my machine being delivered and the garage door it had to squeeze through.

I should have just used the 325 with the Dynapath and gotten more experience with things before doing the control conversion, but I get impetuous some times. I'm not an electrician and I'd never done anything like that before so there was a lot of "hmmmm, what do I do now?" time in the process, along with also needing an electrical service upgrade to my house and getting a Phase Perfect so I'd have 3 phase.

On the other hand I do pretty much know what all those parts are in the cabinet, since I"m the one who had to put them in there and figure out how to hook them up.

If you get a 325 with the 6K spindle and missing the OEM spindle drive (mine came with a Yaskawa drive and 8K spindle motor) don't try to run it with a sensorless VFD. I had a 5hp SJ100 Hitachi and it just wasn't up to the job. I eventually got hooked up with a Control Techniques SP Unidrive drive that utilized the encoder on the spindle motor for feedback and that made a huge difference. It was also way less expensive (though not cheap) than the "solution" that Yaskawa wanted to sell me when I contacted them about a replacement for the original drive.

cheers,
Michael

[MechWerks]

I have been looking at various "tool room" type mills and by the time you get to a 14" Y they no longer fit under a door...and the HP makes the phase converter jump significantly in price. The Phase Perfect is attractive in feature...and harsh in cost.
Trying to "come in" at a low investment is tough and even tougher when you really don't know what a machine has been doing for it's life. Have been up to the Practical Machinist site too...I am fairly decent at searching out info on the web and the sharing of others helps a lot with getting a grasp on what can be done.
I like the path of familiarity in a machine tool so when it gets ill you can diagnose and fix the problem. Unfortunately, that is not always the case in older machines as the technology varies considerably. A PC controller is getting to be a decent option for refit as the industrial crowd seems to be stuck in the old paradigms of the past.