I'm looking at purchasing a 1980's vintage Acra knee mill (Bridgeport clone) with an Anilam Crusader M system.
It has some issues, the X axis motor (Baldor FMD0000B-00 type) and control board are missing and the CRT is hanging loose in the control box. The inside of the big electronics box is amazingly clean, despite the mill sitting outside. No idea what might be bleeped up inside the box where the CRT is. It also has some very light rust on the Y axis ways, so light that when I moved the table, the way wipers scraped much of it off. A few minutes with fine steel wool and some oil will have that taken care of. The ball screws are perfect, so are the knee ways. The table moves easily with a twist on the bare shafts, the manual crank handles are gone. The top of the table has had some "interactions" with tooling and rust. I figure get it trammed then use a big face mill to surface the table just a bit. The rest of it looks to be in quite good condition. Taper looks to be CAT30 or any of the others that are the same angle and have two large notches in a ring. Even a K&T would work if I made longer blocks for the nose to reach the slots. Seller wants $300 but I have a guy who knows the seller very well, will see about getting it for less, along with a short bed 13" LeBlond lathe that needs a lot of TLC. Don't know if I should pursue restoring the Anilam system and feeding it commands via the serial port or strip out everything but the necessary power electronics and building up from there with a new, multi-axis servo controller board with a USB connection and using the freed up space in the big box for a PC to run it. Electronics repair, not a problem. I know a retired US Navy radioman who was in after Korea for 20 years. He had to build the equipment before he could use it. Never charges for labor, just parts, something to do to avoid boredom. I found a little 4 axis board with USB port on ebay, supports stepper and servo motors, for $50. If that can interface with the existing motors and power supply, hello super dirt cheap CNC mill with 10x50" table. The X axis motor looks like it may be the most expensive part of the whole setup, unless I can find three newer brushless motors cheap. The 4 axis board would add the ability to run a horizontal indexer, or some other useful addition. Then I'd have the still good bits of the Anilam gear to sell. :) Could come in darn near a freebie. The Navy guy has a Compumotor 500 set he said I could have just for taking it away. I've no idea if that would be useful for this. Even if it would, that $50 board looks much more compact and likely easier to use. I looked up the info on the Compumotor box and it seems to me like using a shotgun to hunt mosquitoes, with all the different features it has, most of which would likely go unused on a simple 3 axis mill. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_mar _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
