looking for advice on retrofitting hydrolic mill

hey all!im in the market for a decent mill that i want to retrofit with Mesa/linuxCnC. its a Knüth WF 5 NC, a hydrolic controlled mill with currently a Ljumo-PNC 63 controller. currently the mill isnt operational, but even with the full schematics we cant seem to figure out the current issue.i have done a retrofit before using mesa on a Vermano r170 which used some big servos, but i cant seem to find much info regarding retrofitting mesa hardware on a hydrolic controlled mill.is this even possible, and where can i find some more info on how to tackle this?best regards,steers 

If you are retaining the hydraulics, the question would be how are the hydraulic valves
that control position controlled and what is the position feedback method.

Something does not add up, google shows many of the same model machines with manual controls
www.google.com/search?q=knuth+wf5nc&num=...mgdii=EVvF2wH31GoAHM
So upload some pictures of the machine.

Are the axes moved by hydraulic motors or cylinders? Or, are there electric motors for the axes? Is it really an NC mill, or is that Ljumo just a digital readout?
Driving a machine with proportional hydraulic valves requires "dither" to be added to keep the valve freely floating.

In one of the pictures in a sales catalogue it says There is a WF5 and a WF5NC, which seems to be a control to move.

The attached picture of the original post clearly says WF5 NC on the machine tag. 

It says "punkt-strecken-gesteuert", I guess that means it can move one axis from a given position to another given position at a time?

 

p.s. that thing must be from the last century , older than computers.
 

Servo Zentralantrieb in allen drei richtungen
means
central (single) servo drive for all 3 directions
So not hydraulic, but the tool lock is hydraulic, both for horizontal and vertical head.
In short, retrofitting to full CNC would require removing the central drive and gearbox and adding motors to each axis on the hand crank, most probably.
Also, normally, this type of machine uses trapezoidal screws and brass nuts, so have a lot of backlash, that can be fixed in software to a certain degree, but do not expect much precision.

Means a similar retro fit like these ones? 



forum.linuxcnc.org/12-milling/33035-retr...86-maho-400e?start=0




 

Those Maho's are already CNC from the factory, meaning they have motors on each axis and have ballscrews, so very easy to retrofit.

I had an old Bridgeport mill that had had heavy production use. After getting some level of proficiency with it, I was having BIG problems getting things to fit together. So, I'd make some device, and then in a different setup, make a cover with screw holes that were supposed to line up. They didn't! It turned out that the Acme (trapezoidal thread) screws were more worn in the center that at the ends.
This was enough so that there was a large positioning error when moving from one end of the screw toward the middle.
Tommy, so this machine has ONE servo motor and clutches to the various leadscrews? I've heard of such machines, but never seen one. That does kind of match the amount of electronics in the thing.
Jon

As far as I understood not. I thing the TOT variant had a central motor which drove the axis via some sort of internals. (maybe I remember wrong).