I'm the soon-to-be owner of a 14x22 "Yam" slant bed lathe from a school auction. From what I can tell, they were also sold as "Cadillac" and a few other names, but are essentially copies of a mori-seiki design. If anyone can verify that, or has access to a manual, I'd love to find out more about it.
The lathe has an anilam crusader series M control which sits in a box/cabinet almost as big as the lathe. I'm not aware of any issues with the control, but won't know more until I have the lathe in my garage. The only physical issues I'm aware of with the lathe are that one of the servo motor brackets is broken, and the sheet metal on the back is dented. It's possible it may have tipped at one point, but a friend who is a CNC machinist looked it over and said there's no other apparent damage.
This will be my first CNC lathe. I have a couple of manual lathes, but no experience (yet) in the CNC world. This is strictly a hobby for me - I'm not planning to get into any type of production, but I do enjoy this stuff.
Before I invest too much time and/or money in the lathe, I had a couple of questions:
- is it worth trying to use the crusader control? Or should I be looking at a more modern control, or a PC-based control? The motors appear to be brushed DC servos.
- does anyone know if this lathe can be used manually as well as via CNC? I already have a 14x40 manual lathe, but space is at a premium in my garage so if this could fill that spot, I'd need to consider selling that one.
- if anyone has a copy of the manual, or any other information about this lathe or control, I'd love to hear about it!
That looks like a cool lathe. It shouldn't really cost you anything to try out the current control as it looks like it is wired for 120VAC. If it works, then play with it and see if you can do what you want. I'm assuming the spindle motor is 3 phase, so if you don't have 3 phase power or a phase converter you won't be able to run the spindle and possibly the coolant pump until you address that. I don't see handwheels (manual or mpg) so manual machining as it is may be difficult. You could possibly use the jog controls for non-threading operations until you get familiar with g-code. I don't think the crusader m has conversational (I didn't see that in the programming manual).
As far as manuals go, finding the lathe version of the series M (ML I think) looks more difficult than the mill version. I've got a copy of the mill version which might be helpful for startup. Here is the only ML manual I have found so far:
A retrofit will get you a much more modern control that will likely be easier to use with more features. If it were me, I would play with the old control to see if everything is working, maybe make some parts, and then retrofit. I'm actually doing the same thing on a mill with a series M control. Sinking money into the old control will likely have little ROI. With a decent control, this CNC lathe should be able to replace your manual 14x40 if the reduced center distance isn't an issue.
I went out to pick up the lathe yesterday, but for a variety of reasons ended up coming back with just the crusader ML control (and the tailstock, but hey).
In an attempt to decide if the control is worth messing with, I switched it on to see if it would power up. The lathe is not connected at this point, but I'm impatient...
The fans in the cabinet powered on and started whirring, but the display doesn't come on. I left it powered up for 5 minutes or so to see if it needs to warm up, but the crt is still off. There's a fairly strong "electronics that haven't been switched on for years" smell from the cabinet, but nothing that definitely smells burnt etc.
Is it expected that the display won't power on, if the lathe's not connected?