Ah! Brave soul but on the right track. Having converted a Mazak V5 I have a certain viewpoint. Looking at the emc wiki pages on the conversion of the Mazak at Cardinal Engineering will give a slightly different view. My Mazak was well used and had apparently cut Al all of its life. Backlash on X and Y is in the range of 3 thou. Z is a bit tighter. I think the Galesburg Mazak is somewhat tighter. Mine had a dead 7M control. I think the control on the one at Galesburg still worked but it went away anyway as the intent was to demonstrate conversion of a machine to emc including toolchange.
My experience with the Mazak leads me to believe that 1980 servo drives should be replaced with something more modern. On the other hand you probably want to retain the servo motors as they will be well matched to the machine. Encoders/resolvers are another thing to watch although I hear rumors that Jon Elson is doing a resolver to digital conversion board. I removed the resolvers from the servo motors and replaced the Z axis with an encoder and installed encoders on the X and Y ballscrews. If you have the room you might want to consider a horizontal machine rather that a vertical but they tend to be larger. Plan ahead of time for a source of 3 phase; either real or a good converter. Pick Ray Henry's brains and the other people involved in the conversion at Galesburg. If you can make it to fest ( http://www.cnc-workshop.com/ ) this year you can pick the brains of the conversion crew for the Mazak in person. Dave On May 7, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Witek GB wrote: > I am thinking of taking the plunge and buying a VMC maybe with an > ATC. I plan on buying it for the iron and upgrading it to EMC. I > have manual machine tools already so I know what to look for when I > see a manual machine, but with CNC I really do not know much. What > should I look for? Are there any resources on the Internet that > show you what to look for when buying a used cnc? How can I > determine if the ball screws are good or bad? Servos?... I will > use this machine for hobby work and maybe some light production > runs. Any help is appreciated > > WGB > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > --- > This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference > Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save > $100. > Use priority code J8TL2D2. > http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http:// > java.sun.com/javaone_______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
