Thanks for the input guys, any info and advice is greatly appreciated, the update on my situation is as follows,
Ended up buying two machines, both KMB-1x m BX control, they where bought new as a pair in 1985 by shorts aircraft factory in Belfast, and I thought it would be unfair to split them up after all these years
I hooked up power to one and the x axis refused to move, but after it heated up a while it came good, and I spent a bit of time working out how to program it, a call to Buddy Maughon, and soon I was in business.
Then we had that really cold spell here, with temperatures getting down as low as -15C. for two weeks, I had a feeling it would give me trouble, as there is no heat in my workshop.
Sure enough, when I booted the machine again no x axis again, this time it would not come good.
I spent a bit of time playing around trying to fault find, and switched drive boards around, then noticed that when I poked a ribbon cable connector on one drive, a l.e.d came on, suspecting a loose connection, I poked it a little harder to push it home ...... BIG... mistake......BIG bang and flash from the drive.....
This is when I get some help from "Bloke" on the forum, what a top guy he is, he correctly advised that the original problem was most likley one of the chips on the limit switch board, I replaced those and began to try and find the reason / solution to my servo drive bang and flash.
Turns out that both my machines are fitted with what appears to be rather unusual servo drives, not the randtronics like most others, my machines have servo drives made by PKS-DIGIPLAN, in Poole , Dorset , England, this company later became Parker / Hannifin. the setup consists on a seperate
80V DC supply, a fault logic board that also supplies reference +12v/-12v and logic supply voltage, and the three servo amps, I have managed to repair the fault logic board and one servo drive, one other servo drive was still fine, but I am having difficulty trying to find the fault on the z axis board, there is no short on the board, it will not do anything in the machine, but bings on a l.e.d on the fault logic board, and screen gives the error "z axis motion error - movement too large" replacing with a different drive, the z axis performs fine,
Why am I trying to fix this when I had wanted to retrofit the machine ?,
well firstly, I just dont have the money right now to buy the parts, ( after buying 2 machines instead of 1) and like what 140jodel said above, the Hurco conversational programming is great, I had no previous cnc experience at all, but within 2 or 3 hours I had the machine going through cycles, I was really surprised at how easy the conversational is, and although very basic, it may do most of the stuff I need at the moment, if only I could get the darn thing running again.
I have not even wired the other machine in yet, and do not want to risk swapping boards between the machines in case I damage more, as these PKS boards really do seem to be almost unheard of in Hurco's
Hopefully someone out there will prove me wrong and come up with a blueprint schematic or some other info on them that may help me get mine sorted, or I am going to have to go ahead with the retrofit once funds allow ??