Dmu50v questions

What’s up machinists?
Hopp you are all doing well.

I own couple of older machines and dream of stepping up the game someday... well in baby steps though...

I remember when i was youngster the company i worked for had 2 dmu50evos , the grey early ones.
i remember they werr pretty good but i never ran them..

now 15 years later i see them dropping to a price level i could almost afford one...
but how are they? are ok machines for general steel, stainless and alloy work?
i look at them greenish ones from 1998 and onwards

i could live with a 8000rpm machine .

i would prefer heidenhain tnc426 or 500 series.
i hear the millplus is pretty bad with support or not supported at all?

are there general mechanical issues with these machines?
i know old stuff, i can do repair work and not afraid or that..

i could settle with a V but ofrcourse
evo would be better..
any opinions ?? other 5axis machines in this size to recommend?

cheers all!

I picked up my 2000 vintage DMU 50 V in 2015 for $8000. Very reliable so far I’ve probably had to spend about $1000 for stuff like the upper spindle bearing and a couple of the Siemens 611 servo amps from eBay. It had 10,000 spindle hours when I got it. Another nice thing about these 8000 RPM spindles is that it’s pretty easy to take them apart and rebuild them yourself. Mill plus controls are nice because they just use off-the-shelf radisys VME boards. I got a back up set from eBay for about $400. One thing I recommend is making multiple copies of the hard drive. I have all the original Floppies but it’s much easier to just duplicate the hard drive using a startech hardware drive duplicator. You can also run these on CF cards with IDE adapters but you have to get the right type of CF card for it to work.


To get accuracy out of these older ones that don’t have 3-D quickset installed you need to know how to make a 5 axis reference block and set up the G7 coordinates for the machine. But once you do that the volumetric accuracy really doesn’t ever seem to change much. Mine is still less than .001” for countours or bores flipped from one side to the other. Though i haven’t had a crash on it yet.

Thanks for your reply markp

It sounds like what i'm looking for. a probe would make life easier when accuracy is needed but yeah.it will still do.
Man you really made i bargain i reckon.
Hearing that the 8k spindle is "home" repairable is music to my ears. do you think it was due to crash or are the spindles fragile ?

How is the speed for 3d countouring with those millplus controls ? it really bugs me the support is not avaible for them but there seems to be quite abit knowledge of them online among people who like to share info so meaby i shouldt refuse a machine just because of the control...