Emco PC Turn 55 retrofit

Got myself a new toy last week. Picked up an Emco pc turn 55 with 8 position turret for 425 bucks. No controller, so swapped the ac95 board with a mesa 7i76ed, interfaced with the 3 phasen sm karte with an idc16 ribbon cable breakout board and got the motors to move pretty easily. Did the vfd hookup 2 nights ago. Gotta tweak stuff in, but I'm working on getting everything to work first, then I'll go back and tune it up. Next steps are to interface the spindle encoder and tackle the turret indexing. Pulled about a mile of extra wire out of the thing that I'll use to reconnect the safety switches and whatnot, because who doesn't like safety switches?

Edit for build video links
Part 1


Part 2


Part 3 coming soon

Sweet! I always wanted one of those myself.

I wanted a lathe for a long time. I would've preferred a larger machine, but this is a perfect start. Got it for $425usd. It was on Facebook marketplace for 800

Just got one myself, still ferreting around i would like to keep the drivers and spindle card , not the same as your though ,
best of luck with the project.

Which one did you get? There are a few versions. The pc turn 50 and 55 had two variations of stepper motor and drive setup - the 3 phase and 5 phase versions were totally different and the 50 had an emco proprietary spindle drive, where the 55 had a Lenze 8200. There was also the concept turn series, which was the same machine with different internals. I have the wiring documentation for the two versions of pc turn 55 (v00 and v01) if you'd like them.

If it's a concept, email Michael at emco. He's been spectacular with his support.

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its a 1998 Emco PC Turn 55, AP6 V00 with the Proprietary emco stepper drivers and spindle card , , cards areY4B081000 AC95(Brain) Y4A018000 (stepper-driver) and Y4A 400 000 (spindle controller)
Yep , I would be delighted if you send on the manuals.
I saw a post here from a few years ago saying you can replace the AC95 card and drive the Y4A cards directly ,

The AC95 is the same board that was in mine. X104 is your 16 pin ribbon cable, which provides the step and direction signals to the stepper driver (in my case, the 3 phasen SM karte). Your spindle drive is going to connect through X107, in my case it was X107 and X1070 for the lenze vfd. Yours looks different, but I think it's still doable. I believe yours will wire more directly to the analog spindle IO of a 7i76 than mine did, in fact and considering mine was fairly easy, yours looks to be as well, from a schematic standpoint, anyway.

I highly recommend getting an IDC16 breakout board on amazon. It's like 14 bucks and eliminates having to strip the ribbon cable wiring. I'm doing a video series on my build, which I think will help you immensely. The stepper control hookups appear to be similar, the turret controller is the same.

This is all still really fresh in my head, so anything you have any questions on, feel free to ask. I might be able to help.

See attached

Oh and by the way, i wound up just yanking the ductwork covers and pulling out every wire that wasn't clamped to the mounting plate. It came together way easier after that

Cool , Thanks for that , the manual will make it a bit easier, I had started following the pins on the board and noting what they were connected to , but this will make it much easier and much less likely the smoke will escape.
Thanks Again

Anytime. I'd still be picking through it if emco wanted to be real pricks about it. It was nice of them to freely offer up the diagrams we both needed. I tried getting info on a prolight with a completely opposite result