You need to purchase the servo and drive as a set so they are matched to each other. I'd be searching for AC servo drive combo's and in fact I'll be searching soon for some to replace the servos on my CHNC as the drive is giving me problems.
Here is one place that sells servos
machmotion.com/
I've not purchased anything from them yet.
Thanks Chris. Yes interesting read. I will open my machine and see if the boards are the same. Mine is a later model but may have the same internals. If they are I will give it a go. If I was to swap the existing steppers for say Mitsubishi drives and servos ( MR-J2S-40B drives, Hc-kfs43 motors) which Mesa card and daughter board would I need?
Mech john wrote: Thanks Chris. Yes interesting read. I will open my machine and see if the boards are the same.
I think Skunkworks is sometimes sighted here, but he is definitely very active on the mailing list and the IRC. He seems happy with the performance he is getting with just the tweaked parport.
Hi Guys,
finally got the time and space to start work on this project more seriously. The lathe I have is the 'emco pc turn 55'. This machine is unfortunatley quite different from the 'emco compact 5'. I have opened the machine up and am posting pictures in the hope that someone may find them useful or choose to pass comment. The machine actually appears to be quite well made for what it is. Data connection from the old controlling pc is via a serial cable. I am thinking that is simply used to transfer G-code (GE Fanuc series style) file to the machine which stores this and does its thing. As far as I am aware it is all working however the pc is from around 1998 and I can't bear to mess about with it (the old crt was binned as I found it to depressing to look at). The machine was demoed to me and I remember it being with a windows dos prompt. Much better if I can drive it with LinuxCNC.
So here goes - Step one - get rid of the old electronics and start new? - is any of it useful?
