Hurco KMB-IS CNC update

Leith,

I am at work, and will respond better later tonight, just giving you a few thoughts from the pictures.

LOL, yeah hopefully I can be of some help as it is sucky when you cannot get good or any reliable information at all.

Looks like you have the manual spindle, which is a little unfortunate, but its not going to be a game killer. It won't be a problem until you are running a program that has multiple up and down speed changes. Worst case you can build a simple bracket to add a servo on the manual hand wheel that cranks up and down the speed. Later models of this head had a extra servo to do what I talking about. I will find some pictures to help you understand what I am talking about, but if you look at the picture of the spindle head you can see the silver hand wheel to the right. On the newer models with this style of head, they added a servo to the left to do this automatically with the control.

Those Electro-Craft Max 430's are completely fine. I have one Max 400 but have never had to use it. I know that the 400's and especially the 430's were an upgrade when the Servo-Mate drive would give up. If I remember correctly, Midwest CNC was the company that did the most Max 430 upgrades. You are actually set up pretty well for the getting going on the moving the table and spindle as you can wire right to the 430's. Just from the looks of the wiring it does look like a upgrade from Midwest. They may have been OEM for your machine depending on the age, but from the wiring it looks like a upgrade.

The Kwik Switch tooling can be expensive at times, but there is a few places around to find it along and along. Once you use it, you will be hooked on it or any type of "quick change" tooling for that matter. I have been building my collection for several years now and I have most everything I need... multiple collet holders, T&C tapping heads, end mill holders, shell mill arbors, drill chucks, etc... Universal Engineering, TSD, DeVlieg, Collis and others make the tooling, but it is expensive new and I buy all of mine used. I believe Universal Eng and DeVlieg merged.. I know they are all quality products and not cheap knock offs. I would start with just the basic end mill holders such as 3/8, 1/2, and 3/4. Then maybe 2 collet holders to get started making chips. You can easily buy things that you may never need or use, so that is why I state start with the basics until you get a feel of what you need for what you intend to do.

I was running my machine for a few years fully OEM and then I came in one morning and the machine would not boot completely as the computer stopped working correctly. I already was going to retrofit the computer as once in a while the machine would just simply flake out and race to the home position in all axis. This was a huge problem when running a program as most of the time the end mill would snap and go flying through the shop like a bullet. Very scary the first time it happened.

I spent right at 2 years fully converting the machine to LinuxCNC with EtherCAT, and I am super happy with the results. I had the same problem you are facing, NO RELIABLE INFORMATION ON THE WEB. I spent so many nights reading and a lot of searching wiring in the machine. Just removing the OEM computer and power supply go rid of nearly half of all the wiring in the machine. I am glad I got help from Tom (Tommylight) and Albert (Chimeno). Those two guys have helped me big time in the past. Plus several others over the years have helped... Andy (andypugh), Todd (Todd Zuercher) and Pete Wallace (PCW).

I need to get back to work, but I will try and get back with you tonight. Hopefully my notes can be helpful to you, if anything at least keep you from wasting a lot of time like I did.


Robert

Leith

Here is a plan of the Electro-Craft servo motor, just for the future if you need to make brackets. I was going down the same road you were about to go with changing out the servos and drives until I looked up the Nm of the Electro-Craft models and realized how powerful they were. Technically my 1kw Yaskawa's do not develop as many Nm so on paper they are under rated compared to the Electro-Craft models.

I went with the approach of don't change what was working for Hurco, but fix the problem I had which was the controller. This was a win win as I fixed the machine and retrofitted to LinuxCNC with minimal cost.

One thing I would emphasize, if you are not verse with LInuxCNC then you may definitely want to go down the path of using Mesa or Pico for the interface hardware. They are both well documented, especially Mesa. Pete (PCW) is on here all the time, I am not sure if Jon Elson is still, but either of those guys are good to deal with for hardware and help. Jon Elson is one of the original guys that I can remember back when LCNC was called EMC and EMC2. I still have my EMC software put up and notes from Jon back in the late 90's and early 2000's.

EtherCAT is kind of a "No Man's Land" and there is very very little info or people to help. I had to read so much that I feel that I lost part of my life to EtherCAT. LOL... Plus the terminal parts are expensive even with shopping over time. BUT the EtherCAT bus speeds is what got me and I was hooked on how Beckhoff built their terminals for ease of installation. DIN mount with quick terminal wiring connections. I love the Beckhoff setup and every machine that I retrofit at this point will be Beckhoff EtherCAT. Where as the Mesa or Pico cards are around $300 or so to get everything connected together, excluding computer cost much much cheaper than what it cost in EtherCAT. I was lucky and I have about $500 in my setup from doing hard core watching every day for the terminals.


Robert

Hi Robert,

Wow. You have been massively helpful already. Thanks!

I'm game for resurrecting the MAX-430s.... but I want to know something about them first. I'm totally clueless right now. Do you suppose Midwest CNC would be able to provide some documentation?

Servo-izing the spindle speed sounds like a good idea, but that'll have to wait until I get the basic machine operating.

My basic idea for the computer/LinuxCNC is a Raspberry PI4 with a Mesa 7I92 interface card. But this is just a guess since I'm clueless about what needs to be connected to the MAX-430s???

The machine has a compressed air input. But I don't know what its used for. Best guess is some powered drawbar??

And just out of curiosity, what is your approximate location? I'm located near Fort Collins Colorado. Mountain Time Zone.

Leith

Leith,

Hey glad I can help... I know how it is...

I am in Valdosta, Georgia (Eastern Time Zone).

I have a Pi3, but have never tried it with LinuxCNC. I know there are people that have done it, but I am not sure how well it runs LCNC.

I am big on reliability and how fast/well LCNC runs on the computer. I have been using Dell OptiPlex computers and have great luck with them. Specifically the USFF 7010, but these are only good for EtherNet or EtherCAT connections as they do not have PCI slots or parallel ports.

I will have to look up the Mesa 7192, but if using Pi4 then it must be a EtherNet connection.

IF you need to go the route of say Mesa with a PCI card like the 7I77-6I25 PLUG-N-GO KIT, then I would use the Dell OptiPlex SFF model or the Full Size as they will have PCI slots for the card. I was having problems with just one particular terminal that held me up for a year. I got the machine running again very slow by using a dell optiplex 9020 and adding a DB25 card and using Parallel port software encoding for the encoders. This was terrible and only a temporary work around until I could get the EL5151 terminal figured out. with the help of (Chimeno).... super great thanks to Albert, He's the Man... He is from Spain and helped walk me through Beckhoff's TwinCat Software, which the TC2 version is a pain. I battled that software until he got me to use TC3 and down the right path.

Ok that compressed air input is super needed. They don't use a drawbar as the Kwik Switch receiver has a locking nut and no drawbar needed Don't do like other's on the web that tore it all out. That is what powers the Spindle Brake and most importantly the Machine Way Oiler that is located on the back of the machine. If you go to the back of the machine where the air line comes in from the left, you will see the pressure switch, the air regulator and from three it will go over to the Oiler that is at the bottom in the middle. You need to keep this filled up with Way Oil. I use Chevron 68, I will get you the exact data on the tag, but that is what I remember from memory. When you get the machine working, you will always want to make sure you hear the oiler work when you power up the servos as this will give the ways a shot of oil before movement. Oil is critical or you will seize a ball screw.

I will catch back up with you later, I have to get out of here and up to the post office. Hope this helps.


Robert

Leith,

One quick note, I got back on as I did not respond about the Max 430's. I have a manual on the 400's somewhere. I will get it as it will be the same for both models.

Talk to you later,
Robert

There is a Raspberry PI 4 tutorial gnipsel.com/linuxcnc/uspace/ Looks pretty straight forward. But you probably need an RPi4 and make sure its got at least 4GB of RAM so that it will run the X11 GUI well.

I had found a MAX-400 instruction manual. But the front panel connectors are definitely different. Don't know enough about these things to know if it matters.

Was wondering about the compressed air. The input port looks a little munged.

For some reason the oiler is detached and in a separate box. Hopefully it works or can be easily repaired.

Leith