[Newbie] Boxford CNC came home with me, what next?

[xbartx]

New member here with my first post.
I found a unimat lathe at a local garage sale a few months ago and have enjoyed learning and producing a few small parts. This weekend I came upon an old Boxford 160 CNC lathe for next to nothing and took it home with me thinking I might retrofit it with newer electronics.. Seems that these were used in schools as teaching aids, they ran on propriety software on old PCs. Looks like early 90’s. I spent a few hours seeing what worked and what didn’t with the manual controls. Two issues going through the manual controls are no reverse motor operation and the motor itself is sluggish with hesitations upon startup.
I don’t mind putting some time and money into the project. Wondering what I can salvage from the original. When choosing new electronics is the software to run it important that is decided first?
Thoughts, advise?
-Brad

I forgot to put the cover back on the speed controller before I took the picture. It is a Lenze 530 speed controller and Lenze motor

 

[Janderso]

Just want to welcome you to this outstanding forum.
If it doesn’t have dials I can’t make it work.
Someone will be along shortly

 

[matthewsx]

Hi and welcome.

Looks like it may run servos rather than steppers so you’ll have to do some research.

Cheap control boards can be had on Amazon but with something like this I’d want to make sure you’re not downgrading.

@JimDawson may have some thoughts on this. It might be possible to just change out control software and keep the existing electronics.

John

 

[mmcmdl]

That's a pretty cool mini cnc lathe there . What's the chuck diameter for size reference ?

 

[markba633csi]

This looked interesting: ---- CPM! that's going back a ways...

BOXFORD CNC LATHE

About 3 years ago I decided that I wanted to see what CNC was about. I had read some beginners guides to CNC, and CNC programming, but it was obvious that I would need to buy a CNC machine and act…

johnsmachines.com

 

[xbartx]

That's a pretty cool mini cnc lathe there . What's the chuck diameter for size reference ?

The chuck is about 3" in diameter, my unimat is "2

Looks like it may run servos rather than steppers so you’ll have to do some research.

I assumed they were stepper motors because of there being only 4 wires on the motors and thought servos typically had more. But I will look into it some more

It might be possible to just change out control software and keep the existing electronics.

John

I would be interested of any options!

 

[xbartx]

Looks like it may run servos rather than steppers so you’ll have to do some research.

When I look online I see the Easy Power gs-d200s are listed as Stepper Drivers. But I don't know how servo motors are driven.

 

[wrat]

That'll actually put out quite a little bit of work.... IF it works!
You're gonna hafta send it some codes to see if works.
This comes from a time when all the computation was done elsewhere and this just took the codes and moved with them. Now, sure, if you're intent on throwing down new controllers, then you can do whatever you want. But if this works, it's fairly useful as is.

 

[xbartx]

That'll actually put out quite a little bit of work.... IF it works!
You're gonna hafta send it some codes to see if works.
This comes from a time when all the computation was done elsewhere and this just took the codes and moved with them. Now, sure, if you're intent on throwing down new controllers, then you can do whatever you want. But if this works, it's fairly useful as is.

Being a total newbie and a Macintosh user, would this involve finding an old pc with a parallel port and feeding the lathe gcode?

 

[matthewsx]

With stepper motors it should be pretty straightforward to swap in current low cost drivers and a cheap controller.

Keep an eye on the classified section here, I recently decommissioned my CNC project and need to liquidate some stuff.

You can use Mach 3, or my favorite Linux CNC. It’s not that hard to set this up and there’s lots of folks on here to help.

Looks like a worthy project, actually starting like this much of the hard work is already done.

You’ll need to figure out how big of drivers you need, probably like this would do.

Amazon.com

An old PC with parallel port will be the cheapest way to go. Not that hard to setup, a little learning curve but not too hard.

John