[bean7795]

About 5 years ago a friend and I bought a maxnc 15 closed loop mill bought all the upgrades except a 4th axis we had a little project we wanted to do . well the project fell thru so the machine sat for years I got it out of the shop and started trying to work with it . It would do all kinds of goofy things mainly stalling in the middle of a program or making a cut in y axis thats not in the program . I contacted maxnc he expalined that he bought the company out and that the machine that we had purchased used crappy controlers and other inferior parts to make the motion happen he said that the steppers were good to great just the bits controling them werent good and suggested that i buy a 650 upgrade to get them to working . The question i am trying to answer is what do i really need to buy to make this little mill work with mach 3 it has pacific scientific steppers and all the wires except the y axis doest have the little attachment that makes it closed loop . any info would be very greatly appreciated .

[awerby]

Otto, the guy that started MaxNC sold it, but ended up buying it back from the person he'd sold it to. The original controller architecture was never very good, depending on TIP 120 transistors that would regularly overheat and cause problems. You could get an upgrade from him that might make it better, but if it were me, I'd scrap the whole controller system and replace it with something likely to be more reliable, like this one: STDR-4C - Soigeneris.com

If you want to tinker with the system you've got, it's possible to get it to work with Mach3; I posted a XML file that does that for the 3-axis CL machines to the MaxNC users group archives. Go to yahoo groups and search for MaxNC to find it. You'll have to join the group to get access to the archives. The attachment which makes the motor run closed-loop (sort of) is an optical encoder. You can get them from US Digital: US Digital | Products » E5 Optical Kit Encoder But if you're scrapping the original controller or trying to get it to work in Mach3, don't bother, since those replacement systems won't use the encoder signals.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

[bean7795]

thank you very much for the reply that controller seems awesome but I dont know that the machine is worth dumping another 850 in i guess ill try figuring out the other route you gave me i figured since i already had the motors that the rest of the hardware would not cost as much as its looking like its gonna. seems a bit high for more of a toy then anything. really wishing that we had not bought this machine i think i could have bought a kneemill and converted it for what we got in to the little paperweight we have now