Nice machine, needs upgrade. Any advice?

Thanks in advance for any help.
We’re a non-profit arts/makerspace that inherited a homemade 5-axis CNC router that was made in the late 90’s. It’s in nice shape and doesn’t have many hours on it. Back-story is apparently that the original owner had it made for cutting tire molds but that it didn’t meet their needs. Second owner picked it up as a hobby but never had the resource/time to get it going. After 10 years or so in his garage he donated it to us on the condition that we never call or ask for any assistance from him on it. Ha! Deal!

Here are a couple pictures
Machine
Z Axiz


It’s a robust 5’ x 5’ fixed gantry, movable bed machine that uses all Kollmorgen H-series servos. Motion control is handled by a discontinued, unsupported, proprietary Galil DMC-2100 controller that uses a Galil PCI card to communicate with the Windows XP computer.

We’d like to upgrade the software and motion control on it to get rid of the Galil and use LinuxCNC instead. Since we’re a non-profit makerspace we don’t have a lot of room for expensive mistakes. I think we’re got the resources to pull it off but we don’t have anyone experienced in building CNC from scratch. We’ve got Linux admin, electrical engineer, old-school machinist, CNC operators and skilled CAD/3D modeling folks. Between us I’m confident we can do it.

I’d love to start with any 30,000 ft view issues we should consider before we take a wrong turn and waste resources on a dead end. Ideally, we’d also convert the bed to handle 8’ sheet goods and add vacuum hold down at some point in the future when the software/control is all squared away.

If you wanted to turn this machine into a relatively simple and flexible sheet goods cutting router, how would you approach it?
Cheers.

I have a few cnc routers for sheet goods. The first thought that goes through my mind is converting it to 5X8 machine and make it a moving gantry with a nonmoving table. Especially if you are planning on vaccum table.Take the linear bearings off the table and put them on the sides, well, you dont have enough travel for a 5X8 but you could get new rails.

Then cut down the uprights to the non movable gantry and fabricate adaptors to attach them to the linear rails you put on the side,. I dont know what system you have on moving the table, ballscrew? Well, you would need rack and pinion for the gantry, and yes you would need two motors on the gantry.

This is just my thoughts,

5i25 and 7i77? I would put sevo's on this thing. They have some nice ones around 400 a set these days.

Bob

Why would he ever want to do that (convert to moving gantry). Every moving table machine I've ever used was vastly superior to comparable moving gantry machines I've worked with. (far stiffer and more robust frame design)
Applying vacuum to a moving table is a simple task only requiring a length of vacuum hose a little longer than the length of the table travel. (the table length + half the circumference your hose can bend)
The only advantage I can think of that a moving gantry has over a moving table is floor space.
(If you don't believe me, we have 2 moving gantry machines with 5x10ft tables that we would gladly trade even up for any comparable moving table ones.)

I'd second the Mesa hardware and keep the old servos.

I'd probably try to keep the 5 axis ability, as long as the rotary axis don't compromise the machines rigidity, it should be able to process sheet good fine as is.

You might be able to resale the old Galil parts on ebay.

We're not going to be able to put that kind of money into it at this time.

For now, we'd like to upgrade the control from winXP/old Galil/Mach 3 to LinuxCNC. We'd like to avoid changing out servos and drive mechanics, at least for now. Everything seems to be in good working order. We've run it a number of times and it mostly works. Sometimes it just stops in the middle of a cut which is frustrating. Also, with Mach 3 we don't have any 5-Axis cutting capability which isn't a big deal right now but we'd like to be able to make beveled cuts for a future project.

The existing servos are old, but seem to be in great shape and have very low miles.

I would change the moving table for moving gantry. Thats just my opinion.

I'm with Tommy on this. The reliability and ease of conversion with the Mesa boards makes the $300 well worth it. I'm partial to using the 7i92, you just have a computer with no extra hardware connected with just Ethernet. Once I started my conversion everything kinda fell into place. Your list of folks to do this should make this go pretty smoothly.

Best, Dan.