Hi everybody
Hope this is the right place to say hello and ask some questions. If not, sorry, please boot it somewhere else and I'll follow.
To introduce myself:
I'm of an age to have mainly grey hair (not from worry), I served an apprenticeship in the 60s as a machinist, left that a little early and went to a motorcycle racing garage, didn't work out, so joined the Royal Air Force. 27 years later, and having already settled in Scotland with a garage full of old motorbikes and cars, my own lathe, mill, grinder, etc, etc, I left the RAF, continued doing the same job as a civilian instructor for 4 years, went semi-commercial flying on a Fisheries Protection job, then finally retired in 2009.
I eventually settled in Lincolnshire, England, and started acquiring some machine tools again, having had to sell the previous workshop full.
To cut the rest of this boring story off:
First of all, I have quite a lot of machining experience but NONE of it CNC, just a yearning to learn and keep my brain alive and kicking, so:
I found a Parkson M1250 horizontal mill with the optional vertical head. It came from a closed down machining business and was going for next to scrap price and, some may say unwisely, I bought it - then wondered how to actually get it working again. The machine itself is pretty sound by the look of it and has a 7.5 HP main motor and a manual gearbox. It was built as (what must have then been state of the art) full CNC, probably in the late 80s, and has no manual reversion, ie, no possibility of fitting handwheels. It has ball screws for the X, Y and Z feeds. My difficulty is it has a Heidenhain TNC155 control system into Indramat 3TRM (I think) motors. I don't know if the control system still works, probably not, but I'd like to update the control system anyway and retain as much of the drive system as possible. If that too turns out to be U/S, then a new control system that will adapt to a different feed motor would be sensible.
Other than 'Call the Scrap Man' has anybody any ideas of a route to follow - without needing another mortgage................
Will