Hardinge CHNC retrofit- Another one on the way!

Thanks again Andy. Anyway finally got all the inhibits on the spindle drive off, and was ready to test, and then the fireworks started again:angry: ! Guessing that one of the bridge transistors was shorted because it fried quite a few resistors as well as burned a hole in another transistor. Geez I just cant get a break with the lathe, lol. The Ge Hi-ak drive has a dual bridge power supply for the spindle drive. I pulled out both boards for inspection/ repair. I noticed one looked to be in very good condition, my guess is that it was repaired earlier, because of the new looking components on the board. So now I need to go shopping for some new transistors, resistors and a few capacitors to fix this thing, hopefully anyway. If its not fixable I guess it will be shopping time for a new spindle motor/drive.

There are sevearl pull out Hi acks on ebay for cheap.You will have to figure out by trial and error what the power transistors actually are,as they have a Ge pn and ge will charge you scary money for them.

I would think twice about using all those old wires as AB controls were notorious for having connection problems.I chased never ending problems in 550 and 1050 Ge controls with old wire.....Ge didnt use stranded wire.

You can run the porter dc motor with a Gettys n350 dc drive.They are every where.They are not transistors,scr's,but they work and are bullet proof.

I did see the Hi-ak drives on Ebay, I think they were asking arond $450 per board, this may be a last option if I cant fix them myself. I had a shop that does Hi-ak repairs quote me around $900 to fix the one board so ebay woluld be slightly cheaper. However I have already purchsed all of the components I think I will need for arond $150. Lucklily the good board i have, has newer non motorola transistors that were avaliable at Mouser, so I ended up using them instead of the GE variety. The main power transistors were $2.50 each x 10 , the driver transistors were $4.50 each x2, and a few misc resistors caps and such. the only one that was a little spendy was one of the pull down transistors, at $35.00 per, however I only needed one. As for the wiring, they did use stranded wires on this machine, and they appear to be in decent condition. Worst case I will need to replace the bad cables as I find them. Unfortunately I dont know much about the Gettys drives so matching one to the motor could be problematic. Esecially since I couldnt find any datasheets for their drives on the manufacturer website.

Andy downloaded the most recent 5i23 bit files and moved to

sudo mv ~/Desktop/rmsv8_8.bit /lib/firmware/hm2/

However after moving them I think the file path should have been

sudo mv ~/Desktop/rmsv8_8.bit /lib/firmware/hm2/5i23/ ?

However now I cant seem the get the sudo mv command to work for moving the files one lever deeper. I tried

sudo mv ~/lib/firmware/hm2/rmsv8_8.bit /lib/firmware/hm2/5i23/

with no luck, I think my notation may be incorrect.

Try this:

open a terminal, enter sudo nautilus

it opens a super-user graphical file browser.

then copy and paste the file where you want it.

I have everything moved to the correct directory, there was 7 bit files and 5 pin files. However when I try to use PncConf I still do not see my daughter cards in the list of selectable cards? I also DL'd the freeby.mesanet.com/rmsvss6_8.bit file and moved it into the same directory with the same result in PncConf. I can see the bit file contents if I load it in Hal, but im not sure how to select a bit file from inside PncConf?

PNCconf requires a XML file that Mesa doesn't provide. It must be hand made.
I require the PIN file then I can build one for you.