Hello all, I have recently acquired an Emco 120p lathe. Everthing looks good on it. But, it's a 380 volt machine and there is no transformer for it. It also has the old electronics and i think it's time to bring this machine to the modern age.

I've already stripped some of the lathe down, removed the spindle motor and the 5 phase steppers. I can tell you now that these things were really built.

Anyway, here are some pics of the strip down...





I'm replacing the original spindle drive with a Magnetec constant torque 4 hp inverter duty motor, with a 4kv VFD. The steppers are 2 Keling Nema 34 640 oz-in. For drivers, I'll be using 2 Keling digital drivers for the steppers.

Hopefully, i'll be able to utilize the spindle encoder. I'm also hoping to work something out for the tool turret...



I've already built the computer for it. It's an itel mini-itx with dual atom processors, 2 gig of ram and 160 gig sata laptop drive...nice and small

The system will be dual boot, with win xp and linux. I want to see how Mach3 and Emc2 work on the lathe.

that's about it for now....more to come

pete