Finally got motion after my year-long project on my Lagun FTV-3. Originally a Bandit machine, I got this mill stripped of electronics and missing the Y-axis servo mount for about $300.
Pics below are of me dragging it home on a trailer and getting it in the shop with a telehandler, after I got it home the "fun part" happened - completely tore apart and rebuilt the varispeed head, new bearings, belt and a ton of cleanup, rewired the motor, stop and reversing contactors, new bearings on the ballscrew ends, new Y-axis bearing/motor support, built a power supply with a toroidal transformer, rectifiers and some big capacitors from ebay.
I should have figured it out earlier in the project, but since the drives were missing when I brought it home I thought I'd use Geckodrives, then bought some Rutex drives and finally in March did what I should have in the first place and bought a Mesa 5i20 FPGA PCI card, 2 Mesa 7i29 motor drives and a 7i37TA to wire in my estop and limit switches.
Motors on X and Z are originals from the bandit control but have been fitted with Avago 500 PPR encoders. I hocked the original resolvers and tachs on ebay for almost as much as I paid for the mill. I have CUI line drivers next to the encoders and soldered them up to Lapp Olflex 190CY 5 twisted pair shielded cables that run back to where they are hooked on the 7i29 differential encoder inputs.
Everythings running on a WTM mainboard with an Atom 1.8 Ghz processor, onboard video and a PCI slot for the Mesa board, that I got on ebay for $80. I have a 500 gb hard drive that I got from a junked computer thats now running LinuxCNC on Ubuntu 10.04. I also got a "real" industrial keyboard and display enclosure with a pivot mount from ebay for $85 that I mounted to the top of the ram. I also put a light, hold down set and automatic bijur lube pump & flex line on the right side of the mill.
I am finally producing actual motion with the machine on my X, Y and Z axis, and put a short video up on youtube of it:
I've put a lot more explanation & details and pictures on a build log on my website at
www.inrustitrust.com
All told I have a few hundred hours into the whole project and less than $2000 actual cash into the mill (naturally that doesn't include all my cutting & measuring tools).
Looking forward I need to get my PID and feed forward tuning finished, I have a bigger and nicer SEM motor that I'm going to replace the tiny Y-axis motor with and whats now the Y-axis motor is going to power a rotary table so I have a 4 axis machine.
