[Rambozo79]

Hello,

I never posted here before, but did spend a little bit of time lurking around. I kinda need some advice because I don't really know what to do with my machine right now.

I have been helping my father work on an old Bridgeport Series 1 cnc with a boss4 controller that my brother picked up several months ago. We stripped all of the electronics and managed to getting it working with some new hardware. But now we are really rethinking the approach we took and are looking into redoing the thing.

We ended up running the origional steppers via resistors and got it all going with a Delagrange 4xcnc15B controller board. We have encountered power and heat related problems, in addition to what appears to be lost steps. We are blowing out the 10amp fuses on the drives and when running any decent amount of code, the machine will loose accuracy and tear into my part. And that failure rate is not acceptable considering it happend 2 out of the 3 times we ran the machine.

So I am thinking about these steppers and whether or not they are worth trying to use. We can't really get any kind of feed back from them, as far as I know, and I am kind of afraid that the problem might persist if we run them open loop. I mean, we could fix the power issues by going with some kind of chopper drives like Geckos, but I don't know if that will fix the problems with loosing steps. So I am thinking that converting to Servos would be the better solution.

But I don't know if I have much faith in being able to piecemeal this thing togeather again. I mean, I did it once, and this is where I ended up. So I was looking into some kind of drop in kit, and was looking at lowcostcncretrofits.com, but I haven't found much feedback on these kits. They look like they would be great drop in parts, but I don't know if it's what I need for my machine. Or if it would be better still to buy components seperate and put it all together on my own.

Any advice?

Thanks.

[turbostang]

FWIW, I am in a similar situation. I have a series I with centroid controls. The controls are great, the machine is great, I just need more travel (this particualr model only has about 15" in X and 10.5" in Y)

So, I was hoping to find some sort of a drop in kit to buy and put on a completely different machine... maybe a kit that came with servos and could be controlled by Mach3.