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Another (New to me) Milltronics Partner 1 Owner.
Hey guys,
First off I want to thank you all for still helping people out on these old machines! Having an active forum made me feel a lot better about buying a project of this magnitude. ZZZZ, sportybob, Brian L, and Marty you guys have already helped me out so much it's unbelievable. I've read all the way through Brians first thread probably about 5 times now.
I do have a question that I want to ask, I think I may have actually made a bad mistake, but I feel the need to write a little about my experience buying and moving the mill first for anyone interested in reading about it and maybe for me to refer back to later. If you're not interested you can skip down to the bottom where I'll ask my question.
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Okay, so I've been looking for a CNC Mill now for about the last 2 years. I knew a while ago the Partner 1 was one of the top machines on my list considering my low $5,000 budget and all the features I was looking for. It needed to fit in my garage, so I was looking for a light weight machine with as much travel as possible in a relatively small footprint, Running on single phase power was going to be a huge plus, and I also wanted a tool changer. Obviously, considering my budget the thing couldn't be very far away either, because paying for rigging and transporting a mill is just outrageous. And I knew going into this I was probably going to be buying a project in need of some service or repair.
Finally, after years of relentless eBay and Craigslist searching, this Milltronics Partner 1 popped up that met pretty much everyone one of those requirements.
Milltronics Mill | eBay
I'm located in Memphis, TN and this was just outside Tulsa, OK. Only 6 and 1/2 hours away Google told me, which was a stones throw away considering all the other places I was more frequently seeing CNC mills sell from like Chicago and Ohio. And equally as important, he had a forklift there and was willing to load the machine on a trailer for free! All that was left was seeing if my dad was up for a road trip seeing as how he's the one with a truck and trailer. And of course the fun question as to how I was going to get the thing off the trailer and stuffed in my garage..
Well, it turns out that trailer wasn't exactly road worthy at the time, so I did have to do some work to it first which included hammering out a fender and replacing a couple blown tires along with running some wire for the lights. But after that, We basically drove there, he loaded the machine on the trailer with a forklift and we chained it down and headed back. I was obviously taking some big risks here that I may still live to regret, the machine was not under power, so I wasn't able to see anything run or see exactly what the issue was with the x axis that he described in the eBay auction. I also did not remove the controller or front panel. Which I've heard is a bit dicey and some people have had some bad experiences from not doing so. I just kept thinking to myself that whatever was wrong with it, I'd still probably be able to fix it, right? I mean, I knew I was going to have to work on it in the first place anyway, so what was a couple more problems to trouble shoot I guess? Oh, And we actually ending up driving through a rain storm on the way back too. (we stopped and rapped the machine up with a tarp)
Okay, so finally after a straight there and back marathon of a trip the machine was sitting outside my house on a trailer. I figured it was downhill from there. All my problems always seem easier to solve when their right there in front of me. And now I even had a little time to sit back and think as well.
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The first obstacle to overcome was making sure the thing could fit through the garage door. It was about 6" or so too tall the way it was sitting, because before unplugging the machine, I guess someone thought it would be a good idea to jog the Z axis all the way up first. I figured if all else failed I would be able to just manually turn the lead screw and lower it down, but I wanted to see if I could get the machine to do the turning for me. I thought if I could back the trailer up to my garage close enough that I might be able to get my welding extension cord out to it and try to fire the thing up. Which is were my first forum trouble shooting session came into play.
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I really still had no idea if I could even power the thing with single phase or If I was going to have to buy/make a phase converter first. The machines serial plate had a pretty easy to read 3 phase right there on it, but I had seen some of you say they would run on single phase power. Turns out you guys were right, I put my 220 single phase into the no. 1 and 3 slot on the terminal, covered my eyes, flipped the switch, and the machine powered up and nothing starting smoking!! The computer monitor was blank, but I was still pretty sure I hadn't blown anything up. So began the computer/controller trouble shooting.
I took the side of the computer off to see what I was working with. I've been working with and building computers for a while now but it was still somehow very foreign to me. I guess I just didn't start long enough ago to be familiar with such a retro machine. But I inspected it just the same, everything looked like it was still in its place well enough, but I pulled the cards out and reseated them anyway. Then I flipped it back on to see if it made any difference. I was already thinking about how I wanted to put a computer power switch on the thing. It's a bit too dramatic for me while trouble shooting a computer problem to have to switch on that loud breaker and having all the machine fans kick on, then having to run around to the other side of the machine to see if what I did made any difference. After a couple of attempts of fiddling with the cards and wires I got a video signal. I felt a bit relieved but knew I wasn't in the clear yet.
So I had a video signal, but the computer was screaming about losing it's cmos settings. I went back and started to hunt for a battery finding that someone had apparently removed the original battery, and poorly soldered on an extension which had broken off. So, I figured fine, I'll just clear the cmos error for now just to get the Z axis jogged down. At this point I started to feel a bit paralyzed though because I couldn't navigate through the bios without any arrow keys!! I thought about just plugging in a keyboard, but I didn't even know what the keyboard connector on the motherboard was even called, let alone actually have any keyboards that old. I immediately went inside to research and ordered a couple AT to PS2 adapters so I would be able to plug in a keyboard later.
After getting past the cmos error I got another error about some drive failures as well. It turns out my machine had a simdisk and the battery was dead on the thing. I read enough on this forum to be able to go through the simdisk setup and formatting which finally allowed me to get to the controller software!! I was stumped again however because it wouldn't let me jog anything without homing out the machine and It couldn't complete the homing sequence, because it looked like either the x or y axis was a little confused. I was able to find help again through the forum and by using ZZZZ's access level home here trick I was able to successfully to jog the Z axis down!! One big problem solved, and I was definitely relieved to be able to get into the controller software and jog all the axes around a little.
The next big issue was obviously getting the machine moved into the garage. A couple rigging companies wanted over $1,000 just to move the machine from my driveway into the garage. That wasn't happening. To rent a forklift it was going to cost about $400, which to me was a worse case scenario. The most fun approach I could think of was seeing if I could unload the machine without a forklift!! I mean, if the Egyptians could build the pyramids without any equipment, surely I could unload a machine from a trailer without a forklift right? It wouldn't hurt that it would also be saving me some money.. And besides, I had an idea brewing in my head that I was sure could work! Basically I wanted to anchor the mill to something and pull the trailer out from underneath it. I knew there was also the issue of moving it around once I got it off the trailer, so I wanted it as close to the garage as possible when I pulled the trailer out. I jacked the mill up and built a 4x4 sled underneath it to help it side off and also to give me something to put some pipe under once it was on the ground so I could roll it up the driveway and into the garage.
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Then I pulled my jeep up next to the back of the trailer and as close to the garage door as I could get to use it as the anchor. I wrapped a tow strap around the machine and chained it to the Jeep.
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Then slowly started to pull the trailer out from underneath the machine, I used some soap and water to help it slide a little because at first I was just pulling my jeep sideways.
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Once the machine was nearing the end of the trailer I attached the ramps to it and continued pulling the trailer out. The machine went down the rams smooth and even all the way to the ground!!
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My drive way is definitely not smooth, it's a very bumpy washed finish. It's also at a pretty good incline. Trying to push the machine by hand up the drive way just wasn't happening. I had an idea to use the trailer to push it instead! But even then, pushing the machine on the sled was too much friction, The back of the trailer started to raise up before the machine was even thinking about moving. The next step was to put the 1/2 pipe under the sled so it could roll up the drive way, but again, being so bumpy, the pipe wouldn't roll... Then I had the idea of placing some cedar planks down for the 1/2 pipe to roll on, and finally things started moving!!
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Once the Machine was in the garage, (sorry about all the junk) I needed to rotate it 90° because my goal was to put it all the way at the back of the garage facing the door. My dad had the wonderful idea of just pushing on one side of the sled to turn it.
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Once we pushed it enough on that one side, we were able to push it on the opposite side to turn it the full 90°! There was still some work to be done however, It needed to go further back obviously, but first it wasn't quite centered where I wanted it, and even though the floor was smoother than the drive way, I still couldn't push the machine by hand on the pipes. I was however, able to use my high lift jack and some 4x4's put it up against wall of the garage to center the machine just where I wanted it. Then it was just a matter of using the trailer once again and pushing it the rest of the way back. I wanted it as close to the back wall as possible to save room, but I knew I would also need access to the computer and electronics which has a panel door on it that has to swing out about 3ft. And there was no other way to remove to door either!! It literally had a full length piano hinge welded on both the door and the control panel, no hardware, spot welded at about 5 different locations and welded across the top and bottom of the hinge as well. That would have just been a ridiculous waste of space for such a silly thing. So I drilled out the spot welds and ground the welds off the top and bottom and popped the hinge off the controller. I imagine it won't be too difficult to put a couple cam latches on that side to hold the door on with. Then we were able to push the machine all the way back and leave me just enough space to get to the electronics and put the chip pan in place.
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Pretty much for the last week I've been waiting on some parts and working on the computer side of things. I pulled the computer or card cage out and I've been working on it here and there at my computer table. I repaired and replaced the CMOS battery on the motherboard. The battery on the simdisk was dead as well, so it would loose it's parameters and files every time you powered down the computer. That coupled with the fact that the ram disk itself was very small in size I decided to replace it with a larger drive.
Right now I've swapped in a regular hard drive, but I ordered a 4gb flash disk on model to replace that with as well.
Transcend 4GB IDE Vertical SLC Flash Disk on Module Dom 40 Pin SSD TS4GDOM40V S | eBay ($42.06)
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I had some more fun obstacles to overcome getting the files off the ramdisk, I had no luck just sticking the hard drive in there and copying the files from the ram disk onto the hard drive. Nope, I had to use Floppies Discs!! Which I actually didn't have any of, and I ended up having to order some because apparently nobody sells them in stores anymore.
Basically I was able to copy everything off the ramdisk onto one floppy disk. Then I removed the ram disk and installed the hard drive. Getting a hard drive to work on the motherboard was fun too, I have actually never had to specify hard drive geometry before and the motherboard apparently has a limit of 8GB as well which made things a little interesting. After the hard drive was recognized I was able to install dos 6.22 and copy the files I backed up from the ramdisk onto the new hard drive. This forum was invaluable at pointing me in the right direction with the path.dat file and editing the autoexec.bat and config.sys files as well. I even put a menu in the autoexec.bat file so I can chose to bypass the controller software and go into dos instead, because I couldn't find a way to exit the controller software and get back to dos without powering down and sticking a dos start up disk in the machine.
My next step is to replace the motherboard with something a bit newer. I'm convinced I can fit an ATX size board in there if I chop down the standoffs for the I/O panel board. The last part for my new board came in today. It's a ATX slot1 Motherboard with a PII 300MHz and 768MB of SDRAM. AGP video card slot, 4 PCI slots, and 3 ISA slots. 2 PS2, USB, and COMM ports, 2 IDE headers and all on the board!! It's amazing the things you take for granted until its gone one day and your staring at a 486 motherboard and no onboard features except the ISA slots and 1 AT keyboard port..
Motherboard: Elpina Slot One Motherboard AGP 4 PCI 3 ISA ATX Form Factor | eBay ($19.35)
Memory: 1GB Set 512MBX2 168 Pin PC133 CL3 Non ECC Unbuffered SDRAM for Dekstop Tower | eBay ($10.99) (Motherboard Max is 768MB)
Processor: Intel Pentium II SL2U7 Slot 1 450 MHz Processor MMX w Passive Heatsink | eBay ($1.04) (motherboard downclocked it to 300MHz)
I've already got some old AGP video cards, and I have a few PCI network cards as well. So I'm looking at about $73.44 total for the new system. Definitely the most expensive door stop I've ever built. But Running in DOS and needing 3 full length ISA slots really narrows down your options.
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Begin Question Here:
I guess that pretty much wraps up my experience so far, Today I starting working on the machine itself. Cleaning it up and greasing things. Which leads me into my question and the part that I may have messed up. The manual calls for Mobile 1 synthetic Universal grease or equivalent. I had some Valvoline SYD Power Synthetic grease in my grease gun and without really researching or putting much thought in to it, i started going through and greasing the zerk fittings on the linear cage blocks. working with 4x4's I'm use to just pumping the handle until i see grease start to come out of something. So I was pretty much pumping until I started to see some grease coming out around the wiper near the zerk fitting. I had already done all 4 Z bearings when suddenly it hit me that maybe I'm screwing something up. I started reading and I've been seeing all sorts of things about different weights of grease and specific amounts that you are suppose to put in some of the THK bearings.
What do you guys put in your bearings? How much do you insert? And have you ever experienced or seen bearings like this fail due to too much or too thick of grease? How bad Have I messed up here?
And back to the computer upgrade, Does anyone know if the Centurion 6 software will run with the acroloop cards? Or does it have to have the new SBC to work? I'm unsure if its the acroloop cards or the slower processor or both that makes them have to upgrade the motherboards on these systems. So basically, If I upgrade the computer, is it possible to then run the newer software on the older acroloops cards?
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Did I delete my first post?
Phew! My first post is back now, Yay.
I guess I should have specified some more information.
The Machine partner model is PI Series G.
The Controller is a Cent. 5 with a 4-digit-B Serial Number
Here are a couple pictures of the rails for whatever its worth.
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