Hello I am retrofitting this old mg industries 10.5x25 cnc table. It was previously controlled by burny 10 lcd I am looking to update it to linux cnc. What would be the best direction to go with this? My motors seem to be very old is there any chance of reusing them or is it not worth the effort? I included photos of the motors below and the gear boxes they are tied to.
I have the whole tables controller and everything. The drives are old school, massive circuit board lots of little transformers and stuff. Not your regular cnc driver
Find info on the drives, check wiring and if it is in good condition try to power everything up, check drives for errors or strange behavior or smoke, then we can move to testing drives and figuring out what controller you would need.
I think I would much rather go the route of retrofitting new servo motors. I have some money to spend on this not a crazy amount but I would much rather pluck out a new drive and buy a new one when one fails then deal with the gobble of wiring. I am trying to build a machine I can run around the clock. I built a mach3 based system and I am so sick of problems with it. I will send photos of the rest of the electronics and you will see what I'm talking about. I think all the drives are a one piece system.
I think this box right here is what would be the "drivers" I will include some photos of the other boxes that were mounted on the gantry. Alot of stuff was already unplugged and I felt like it did not make sense to have 500 lbs of boxes mounted on the gantry so I went right ahead to taking them all off. The only one that I really see having to stay on the gantry itself would be there is a box for the plasma torch High frequency start and maybe a box that contains all of the drivers to minimize the amount of wire to run threw a cable chain. Do you still think it's worth it to diagnose these motors and drivers or better to start fresh? I'm willing to spend up to a few thousand on motion control if it's what it needs. And can make my own gear boxes in my machine shop or purchase off the shelf if those reducers won't work.
