Wow. This is quite the community! Here's hopin' I end up with a reason to be a part of it!

I work in the IT department of a public high school. I recently was poking around in the back of the school's drafting room and FOUND A MINI-MILL/2, in a nice mdf/plexi booth, buried under some blueprints, balsa house-framing models, and a winter-blanket of dust. Upon finding a teacher who actually knew something about it, I was told it hadn't run in 9 years... wait for it... "due to software problems." *facepalm*



The booth, thankfully, was closed up. The mill was still caked with chips and dust, but it was also still slimy with oil. Not a spot of rust on 'er. Okay, so given the situation, I guess I'm just here looking for answers--yes, answers to a few questions I've thought of, but probably more so the answers to the questions I wouldn't think to ask. I'm technically minded, a quick study, and very handy; but to quote the emc2 manual,
"We learn from experience, if at all. Broken tools, gouged vices, and scars are the evidence of lessons taught. Good part finish, close tolerances, and careful work are the evidence of lessons learned."
So yeah, I'm knee deep in forum searches and printed manuals, and I'm very eager to learn, but I have zero (0) CNC experience and zero (0) budget.









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Already on the agenda: estop, limit switches, home switches (has none of those now, and this is a high school). What I've done so far:

--I've cleaned up the chips and such. I don't want to go to crazy removing the 'grime' though, since it's done a great job this past decade and I have no idea what anti-rust and lube to replace it with. I've read suggestions from painting on plain ol' WD-40 right up to packing with machine grease. Meh?

--I haven't heard back from Minitech yet. In the meantime, anybody know the difference between Minitech Machinery and Minitech CNC? Same town, shared company name, some share model names. Different demographic, different phone numbers, and different staff?

--The floppies that came with it are ©1994 and were corrupted. I hooked it up to a 2600+ AMD HP d325 tower running XP sp3 and installed the Mach3 demo. It clocked okay, but I couldn't get stepper motion. From this thread, I'm suspecting the opto-couplers are too slow. Even 'Sherline half-stepping mode' didn't help. I started from scratch with EMC2 and got each axis to come to life (didn't want to go far though pre-lubejob). I am, however, guessing at the pinouts and control specs. Does anybody have real specs or manuals for this older model Mini-Mill 2? They've changed over the years. A post elsewhere suggested the pins would match sherline style, so I hit that button but I don't have directional control.

--While on that subject, no... I haven't tried to find specs on the steppers themselves yet. Just missing directional control though, I'm tempted to just try stuff until it works. Conversely, I'm hesitant to 'monkey with it' until I get the right pins and numbers locked in for fear of damaging it. I don't have the budget to get better controllers or a breakout board. I also don't have money for new motors if I fry these though. Should I be afraid of that, or are crashing and putting volts where they don't belong all I really need to worry about? Is choosing normal-hi instead of norm-lo or vice-versa going to fry anything?

--Oh, and while I'm thinking of it, do I power on the PC or the mill first? As a computer guy, I'm used to thinking of old peripherals as devices you don't want to power up/down or plug/unplug while the host is running. That said though, if I turn on the [Astron RS-20A] power supply, then turn on the linux box, the Mill makes a bunch of fun, creepy noises I'm used to hearing from big honkin relays. That expected?

--I know I should be asking most of this in separate posts, maybe in different forums, heh. If anybody reading knows EMC2 though, my monitor driver is missing and while everything looks fine over vnc, the physical lcd I'm using has everything 50 px or so low, including the hotspot for the cursor--have to be above what you want click! I read (in the manual?) that I shouldn't update Ubuntu, and can't have vendor graphics drivers. I'm not stuck at 800x600 like it said to expect, but it still stinks. Can I simply not go to 10.10 and the other expected LTS updates are fine?

Okay! That's enough for now. Congrats if you read this far. I'm sure I'll be back with plenty more questions as things progress. Lots of high schoolers with the wonderlust, itching to get milling. I'm itchiest of them all, heh. Any advice or input appreciated!
Cheers, Joel