Gildemeister NEF 480 Retrofit

Hi,

I was always going back and forth between cncing my manual lathe or building a 4th axis for my mill. Then I stumbled across an old cncish lathe. A Gildemeister NEF 480. And bought it this morning. It looked dusty and messy but was for cheap, the former owner broths it this evening. Sadly none of ma forklift owning neighbors hat time, so it is sitting in my yard waiting for tomorrow:

The Idea is to retrofit the baby to linuxcnc. during the holidays I will have a look if I can reuse some of the drivers like I did with my mill or change the drivers and maybe servos too. I think this will be a long journey with a lot of setbacks, starting with having no forklift today

so far so short. more to come...

Still no luck today getting a forklift, so she is still siting in my yard:

I took a first glance at the cabinet and there is not much in it:

this is the brain of my beauty called functions card Berta edition C

After some quick research I will strip more or less all from the cabinet and start fron scratch.

The plan us to use a Mesa 7i95 or 7i97 depending on the servo drive I will use.
I want to use two new servos 2000 rm between 5.9 and 7,7 Nm
I also want to use a vfd to control the motor but still use manual gear setting.
On this Machine you chose the main gear by hand and can switch between two speeds (speed x 1 and seed x 1,6) with the control.
I was thinking about making the gear change completely controlled by linuxcnc but henceI will keep the manual tool change, I will keep the manual gear change. I think can check for the maximum RPM required for the tool in the post and write a Mcode telling the user which gear to chose.
Still a little but uncertain what to do the the old control panel. Ot looks very olds cool with it's segment displays, but I think I will just keep some main buttons, like coolant, the mpg wheel, Estop and cycle start, can the rest with a touch screen.

Next step is to see how many IO's I need to see if I need an additional Mesa card.

Ok very next I definitively need a forklift tomorrow

Made some progress last weekend the lathe is in the shop:



not on her final resting place cause the forklift couldn't push the lathe around the corner without running into the shelfs.
But maybe it's for good, so I habe better access.

I started some disassembly to see what I am dealing with. First a look underneath the control thingi Looks dirty and old school



the a first look at the drive for the cross slide, and the lubrication.



The belt drive will ease the retrofit. I think I will swap the old 110V DC Servo for a 220V three phase servo. This one has 5.4 Nm stall and a brake (or something is stuck). I wonder If I can come away with a 7.7 Nm holding torque servo with 22 Nm max torque maybe 10 / 24 Nm with a little less speed. Or is as brake the way to go?

here comes the carriage drive:



here is the same servo (without brake) used so the 7.7Nm servo will be used here.

A lot of cleaning awaits me:



here a look at the clapping chuck:



this one seems to work electronically. I got a call with DMG today and they will send me alle the information they got for this machine, but won't be very much I was hoping for circuit drawings, the very nice tech support told me that the drawings in this time are more or less useless cause the are nit well documented and don't have wire numbers on them. I will see.
For the Clamping device it's made by Berg maybe they have some manual for this thing. I will definitely concat them.
On the other hand it habs only three wires can't be Thant hard to figure out how it works.

Then there is the question what computer board to use. I am not sure if a raspberry pi would be enough, odroid H2+ or something different. Any suggestions?

Thanks Patrick

Ok thanks for the suggestion.
I want the computer bo be n here:

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and a touch screen on top:

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The idea is to reuse the surface of the old panel:

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the right part will be the (touch) Monitor, with keyboard and trackpad to fold up.
Left of the monitor will be two wheels one for each axis and the estop button.
Thanks for the suggestion with the computers I will have a look at them

So I ordered the Mesa card today.
And for the pc i will give the Eglobal GK Mini Pc a go:
I7-4500U
DDR3 4G RAM
256G SSD
Intel core HD Graphics 4400
Two lan ports
6 oldschool Serail ports
8 USB ports
This all sounds very promising, I hope the latency will be ok.

I also ordered the servos, drivers and VFD. At the moment I am like a kid waiting for Christmas:D.

This will be fun

The first order for the retrofit arrived
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Not really enough to really start but I haven't finished cleaning but made some progress a complete bucket of grime and chips is already full

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The rear cable canal still needs to be cleaned from the grime and I avoided the coolant tank.

it looks quite messy ​and will be something I will happily postpone once more. But enough for now the next delivery guy is ringing...

and he brought some CEE cables and connectors

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and the Mesa card arrived.

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still not enough to start but let's see what tomorrow delivery will bring.

today some more stuff arrived

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now I can start thinking about taking care of the wiring

Today the computer arrived:



I also started to remove the old control:



and the first of the old servos left the machine:



I also removes the housing to get better access to the machine for future rewiring:



I also started to pull and lay out the old cables:



Still in the cleaning and preparing phase of this project I am really looking forward the I can assemble again

at the moment the table with the removed parts is starting to be filled:


more next year