Retrofitting a 1986 Maho MH400E

Just below the ground rail is a red wire and three small pink wires going into some type of block having three orange stripes on the outside. What is that --- a wire junction block?

Yes, it is made by WAGO
It's the 12VDC for the EXE.

Nice Progress Hanno! Bet you had air punches on that!

I remember reading somewhere that you don't want to save HAL files in MS wordpad as it adds such characters.

I am on an eight hour layover in Doha on the way to Auckland. Will be visiting family in February, so it'll be March before I get back to the MAHO.
Mark

"on the way to Auckland" Must be nice., wish I could spend the summer in New Zealand .
Get a Photo of the DMG field office,if you can find it.

Hi Bob,

My Maho (with the Philips control still in it) does 1500mm/min which is several times slower than a lot of stepper motor machines. What I was thinking was that an i7 8 core processor, running on a very efficient system (Linux, as opposed to say Windows) with an SSD hard drive and plenty of RAM is overkill for driving that machine.

The block processing speed on the LinuxCNC interpolator would probably go over the entire program before the Maho completes its first rapid

My comment really came from the fact that I want/need to use what I already have on hand for my retrofit and I find the contrast amusing, putting that kind of hardware in a machine that's fine with an M8 CPU (whatever that even is; on the CPU board there's a whole bunch of chips, rather than a single larger chip, like with the x86 CPUs of the late 80s; I've no idea how fast that board is).

I mean, the Philips control runs on hardware that's way slower than an Amiga and it's been good enough to pretty much centre most of my little business around it. Modern hardware just sounds crazy.

I don't know much about machine speeds from that period, I only know that Deckels usually did 6 m/min in rapids (more than twice as fast as my Maho). I have no idea what the programmable feeds were, I'd have to spend some time on machineseeker to find out. Fair comparisons could surely include tool room mills made by Deckel, Mikron, Kunzmann, etc.

I don't think even modern tool room mills are really fast, if the machine isn't designed for large production runs then it's kind of a waste of resources for the builder to cram it with linear ways and turbo fast servos. In the end, in a factory setting (where new mills always go) the tool room machine is going to be manned by a guy smoking a cigarette watching it peck drill a hole in a fixture at 150 mm/min when he's not tending to a lathe. The workhorse mills are all VMC/HMCs.

The Maho is kind of unique because it has micron grade linear scales and it can be used for very precise cuts, such as mold and die making where a lot of these old machines used to work at first. So now it's better equipped than a standard VMC, but without an ATC and at those speeds there won't be any shop owners jumping at the opportunity to buy a used unit for retrofitting.

Hi! My nama is Denis and i'm from Russia. I've start to retrofitting Maho MH440T with Mesa boards: 5i25, 7i77 and 7i73 for pendant/JOG. I have some questions about this. Can you give me your email?

Hello Denis,
Welcome. Post your questions here, as the answers may be interesting to others.
Mark