Bridgeport Series 1 CNC Questions

[nbman]

Hi,

I'm new here, from Canada.

I'll start by saying, I'm relatively new to machining, so I'm looking for some advice.

I'm looking at purchasing a milling machine and I came across this one, for what seems to be a good price. The owner says the controls are bad. I've been reading a lot and watching videos on retrofitting these older units to modern controls.

What I'm wondering is:

Is this particular mill a good candidate for a retrofit or should I look for something different?
What would you recommend as a DIY kit so to speak to retrofit it?
Any other updates that should be considered besides electronics?
What sort of budget should I expect to retrofit it?

I am an electrician, and built my CNC Plasma table with equipment from CANDCNC, so I think I'm competent enough to take on the task.

Thanks for any advice

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[ferrret3238]

I did one of those that I own about 8 years ago. My original boss 5 controls took a crap and I wasn't going to fix it to keep drip feeding it lines of code so I decided to upgrade the controls also. I did mine on the cheap and reused the transformer, Reused some of the large capacitors and ran the voltage thru a rectifier and fed 3 leadshine DM870's. Went with the original motors also. Reused the original controls on front for some functions and mach 3 for others. I got rid of the varidisc drives and went with timing pulleys and a cog belt. Also a hyungyang 3hp single phase 240 input to 3 ph output to power the motor with a large braking resistor for speed changes and stopping the drive. Its all 240 single phase, even the pc running mach 3 so I can plug it in about anywhere. If I had to do it over again I would go with Leadshine DM2282's. I use them on my plasma table and they work great without a large transformer, more compact in the cabinet. Different, more powerful motors would be better also. The originals are about 800 oz in, but 1600 would be better. I can overspeed te originals and lose steps if the rapids are too fast. I would also try mach 4, the mpg pendant I got doesn't work very well with mach 3. The lag time between cranking the mpg and response from the stepper is terrible. Makes it really hard to manually machine anything with the mpg. Setting up the parallel port with the pc was a big challenge for me, I'm fairly decent with computers but some pc's don't work well with mach. Depending on the spindle, tooling might be hard to find. I have kwik switch 200 and have had to scrounge for tooling over the years, Erickson sounds worse to find.

[nbman]

Thanks for the reply. A friend of mine actually told me to watch out for the Erickson, just like you said, tooling is hard to come by.

Can you identify the control and spindle by the pictures? The machine is several hours away from me so I'm just trying to see if it's even worth the trip.

Based on some other threads I've been reading, I've been looking at Centroid. Looks like they offer some fairly complete packages, but seem quite pricey.

I'm just a hobbyist, so super fast speeds are not a huge concern to me.

[nbman]

A closer pic...

[ferrret3238]

I would not purchase it unless you were planning on retrofitting it. The ONLY way to make it worth anything is to retrofit it. I drip fed the original controls for a while and it really was garbage. If you can get the serial number somebody might be able to lookup the year it was made but mine was 1980 so those controls will be around 40 years old too. The original control has almost no memory, I could only run 400 lines of code approximately before it filled up. That's worthless in my opinion. Not easy to reload from here and restart with drip feeding either. Modern things like soft limits and homing are nice which the original control didn't really have. With a PC and Mach or some other modern controller I can store programs on the machine and not have to worry about missing lines of code drip feeding it. That looks like Ericson tooling but I'm not 100% sure as I have no Ericson tooling to compare it to. I can tell you its not the kwik switch 200 tooling I have. I wouldn't be totally put off by the Erickson if they had a lot of tooling that came with it though.

[Jim Dawson]

Yes, that is Ericson tooling, I have the same on my machine. Looks like #30. NMTB tooling fits, but may require a little trim on the flange. I have not found the tooling to be too rare, I have scrounged about 30 tool holders locally over the years at almost scrap prices. You can also buy it new from Kennametal, but it's a bit pricey.

The options for a controls retrofit are endless. While it's possible to use the original steppers, new closed loop steppers or servos are so cheap today it's really not worth the hassle of using the original steppers. I would look at DMM Tech or Clearpath for motors. I've had good results from both.

[nbman]

Thanks. I have confirmed its Erickson 30, trying to find out if it has any tooling at all.

The only reason I was considering it was to retrofit it. Now I'm second guessing it a bit due to the Erickson, and the fact that it looks like it could be 5-7k to retrofit it.

I've located a Lagunmatic 110 that the owner has already started a retrofit on, but never completed it, using Dynomotion stuff..

[nbman]

Yes, that is Ericson tooling, I have the same on my machine. Looks like #30. NMTB tooling fits, but may require a little trim on the flange. I have not found the tooling to be too rare, I have scrounged about 30 tool holders locally over the years at almost scrap prices. You can also buy it new from Kennametal, but it's a bit pricey.

The options for a controls retrofit are endless. While it's possible to use the original steppers, new closed loop steppers or servos are so cheap today it's really not worth the hassle of using the original steppers. I would look at DMM Tech or Clearpath for motors. I've had good results from both.

Thanks Jim. I was looking at the Centroid stuff, and got a little scared at some of the pricing. I'll check your recommendations.

[Jim Dawson]

The DMM Tech and Clearpath motors are fully compatible with the Centroid Acorn, Mach3/4, and Dynomotion products.

A perfectly useful retrofit can be done quite inexpensively, or you can spend a lot. I spent about $5K on my machine retrofit, but that includes adding the Z axis(mine started out life as a 2 axis) and the 4th axis, including a $2.5K industrial motion controller to run all of it. But most people don't spend nearly that much.

[machinejack]

If the price is right go for it. You sound like you can do the job.I took a Boss 5? and retrofitted it with new nema 40 stepper motors, gutted the controls, wound a new transformer, VFD for the spindle, and a BOB from CNC4PC. using
Gecko drives running it with Mach3. Paid 80 bucks for the mill at a VoTech school auction. There was not a scratch on the table and had very few chips hidden here and there. I have the Kwik Switch 200 spindle the tool holders are available but are costly. It's a beast runs smooth an is reliable. I've put a lot of time and not too much money into it and I think it was well worth it.

[nbman]

I've already been on the DMM Tech website..feeling a bit more confident..I'm just using this for hobby purposes so I'm hoping to keep the whole thing at a $5K or less budget. For simplicity, I do tend to like the "packages" so I don't have to worry about sourcing different bits and pieces from multiple places, and then worrying about compatibility issues.

[nbman]

Bit confused though...what makes the Centroid servo motors so expensive? What am I missing?

[seanano]

Some Bridgeport Erikson 30 spindles have a hole in the spindle for a drawbar. If this one does you can use pretty much any 30 taper tool holders (perhaps with a bit of non-critical grinding) and a simple power drawbar for cheap tool holders and quick changes.

As far as an inexpensive retrofit, you could start with 3 KL-2283 stepper drivers (take AC input so no transformer necessary and their higher voltage output should work decently with the high inductance stepper motors) ($390 total), Huanyang 2.2KW GT series VFD ($140), and a breakout board (< $50). This would work with Mach3 or LinuxCNC using a parallel port so if you already have a computer that meets their requirements you could start for under $600.

Once you have this working you could move up to a hardware step generator (Centroid Acorn, Mesa cards, smoothstepper, etc...) if you wanted better performance.

[Jim Dawson]

Bit confused though...what makes the Centroid servo motors so expensive? What am I missing?

Profit

[nbman]

Some Bridgeport Erikson 30 spindles have a hole in the spindle for a drawbar. If this one does you can use pretty much any 30 taper tool holders (perhaps with a bit of non-critical grinding) and a simple power drawbar for cheap tool holders and quick changes.

As far as an inexpensive retrofit, you could start with 3 KL-2283 stepper drivers (take AC input so no transformer necessary and their higher voltage output should work decently with the high inductance stepper motors) ($390 total), Huanyang 2.2KW GT series VFD ($140), and a breakout board (< $50). This would work with Mach3 or LinuxCNC using a parallel port so if you already have a computer that meets their requirements you could start for under $600.

Once you have this working you could move up to a hardware step generator (Centroid Acorn, Mesa cards, smoothstepper, etc...) if you wanted better performance.

So in this setup, I could use the existing steppers on the Series 1?

[nbman]

Profit

LOL,

Will the Clearpath motors work with Centroid Allin1DC?

[Jim Dawson]

LOL,

Will the Clearpath motors work with Centroid Allin1DC?

I don't think so, the Allin1DC is for use with DC servos. The Centroid Acorn system will work with Clearpath. In fact they show Clearpath motors on their Acorn web page.

[nbman]

I don't think so, the Allin1DC is for use with DC servos. The Centroid Acorn system will work with Clearpath. In fact they show Clearpath motors on their Acorn web page.

Yes, I see it now.

The Acorn is Open Loop, and the Allin1 is Closed Loop...Pro/Cons? As a hobbyist, is it something I should even be thinking about?

[seanano]

So in this setup, I could use the existing steppers on the Series 1?

Yes, assuming they worked. If you wanted to limit your risk, just buy one KL-2283 and test it against all the steppers. If the performance isn't what you'd like you are only out $130 and you could probably recoup most of that re-selling the driver. If you have to buy new steppers and drivers, you are probably looking at about $250 an axis and at that point it seems like you might as well go with the dmm 750 watt servos with dyn4 drives for around $350 an axis:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/163558043596

If you don't go with the original steppers you will likely need to come up with a way to adapt the new motors to the mounts and the pulleys to the new motor shafts. The user mactec54 has a bunch of posts on this site on different ways to do the latter.

[nbman]

Yes, assuming they worked. If you wanted to limit your risk, just buy one KL-2283 and test it against all the steppers. If the performance isn't what you'd like you are only out $130 and you could probably recoup most of that re-selling the driver. If you have to buy new steppers and drivers, you are probably looking at about $250 an axis and at that point it seems like you might as well go with the dmm 750 watt servos with dyn4 drives for around $350 an axis:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/163558043596

If you don't go with the original steppers you will likely need to come up with a way to adapt the new motors to the mounts and the pulleys to the new motor shafts. The user mactec54 has a bunch of posts on this site on different ways to do the latter.

Thanks for this.It would certainly be a nice way to at least get the machine up and running for now, assuming the existing ones work.

What about limits/home switches. I assume the machine has them..can they be reused and connected to new board?