The VMC has finally reached its intended destination, and is off the skates and back on the leveling feet. The chip tray on the right side is a little tight with the wall but it does come out. That's not going to be an issue for a while. I left plenty of room around back to work on the electronics. For now it is on the project list. First thing is to move my big granite CMM table/surface plate back into position. Then I'll need to run conduit w/ 3Φ to it to even test the old controller. I probably could boot that with just 220/110 if I wanted to jury rig something. I'll need to enhance my RPC to actually fully power this thing. I have a 20HP idler right now, probably will add a second idler, either 10 or 15HP, and stage them.
I did get a full image backup of the hard drive of the Acramatic 2100 controller, and I can loopback mount that on my linux box to check out the files. That was an 80GB hard drive apparently installed in 4/2004. The original drive was a 1.6GB hard drive, which had bad sectors, but I also backed up/recovered all but 8kB of that drive, those sectors wouldn't read. But at least I have copies of those. I'm not totally set on converting it to LinuxCNC if I can get the original controller working. It even has an ethernet card, almost certainly 10Mb since it has a BNC jack on it for thinnet in addition to an RJ-45 port. Of course a truly brave sole could try to install an old 32 bit Linux on the original controller, but linuxcnc drivers for the existing cards would be a challenge. I have not been able to find documentation on the internals of a Siemens Acramatic Controller, although I have not tried exhaustively.
Anyhow, I think it looks appropriate with the other 5000lb+ machines, modern technology offset by the little hand crank drill press on the divider wall. For now I'm back to scraping in my straight edge and working on the 12" rotary table automation.
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