[sortafast]

I have a factory Tree Journeyman 325 that I am pondering doing a retrofit to. Right now everything is stock and is working fine, but the controller is a pain to use sometimes, and I would like to get some newer stuff in there so I don't have to worry about expensive break downs later on. Anyway, it has Baldor servos on all 3 axes. I don't have the exact specs on the servos right now but I know they are fairly big and have 500line encoders. Up to this point all the retrofitting stuff I have looked into has been for smaller stuff. Who makes a good servo drives for larger servos? Where would one go about getting them? I just want to start looking to figure out when it would be feasible to do this.

[Al_The_Man]

DC, AC or BLDC motors?
What type of control do you intend? Step/Dir, analogue etc?
Al.

[sortafast]

I am pretty sure the servos are AC, I will be heading to the shop in a bit and I can verify the motor info. As for the controller, I am leaning towards linuxCNC if that helps at all, it has a Dynapath Delta 20 on it right now. I am still in the shallow end of the pool in regards to my knowledge of retrofit stuff.

[Al_The_Man]

If you go with Linux EMC and the drives are analogue input and still OK condition, you could look at using a Analogue card to drive them.
Al.

[sortafast]

The question becomes, how does one tell if they are analog? Also how would that work if I got 2000line encoders on the servos? I guess it boils down to if it would gain me anything to go with a newer servo driver, other than possibly increased reliability. My machine was made in 1992 I think (some of the electronics have 1991 on them). I just want the machine to be able to be more reliable and not have to drip feed programs that are over 1200lines long. Plus being able to add a 4th axis and some other bits would be pretty nice as well.

[Al_The_Man]

If the motors are AC or BLDC they are less maintenance and relatively modern, and have been trouble free so far, why change them?
If you have the Model no's for the drives, it may be possible to tell the nature of the command from the Baldor site.
Al.

[sortafast]

Here are some pics of the parts. I am assuming the MSI deal with the circuit board is the drivers for the servos. From what I can google and read on the placard, it looks like the servo motors are DC, yes? Does this complicate things? Would it thus be easier to just get new servos with new drivers when doing a retrofit?

[underthetire]

They are analog dc motors. All the knee mills were.

[sortafast]

So does this idea for a retro fit mean that I need to do a total gut-n-stuff to get the most out of everything? I would like higher resolution on the servos for no other reason than because it seems like a good thing and make things more accurate. I am beginning to think it may be more worth while to just leave things be and try to make this machine make me enough so that I can buy a newer VMC

[unterhaus]

learning to live with the controls as they are is always the most economic choice.

If you were to do a retrofit, linuxcnc would probably be your best bet. I use interface cards from Mesanet.com, but Pico Systems could also set you up and Jon seems to be really interested in getting people's machines running. Do you have schematics?

[sortafast]

I do not have the schematics for anything right now. I think I can get them from ZPS USA as they have all the old Tree stuff. I am probably just going to have to live with it for now I guess. Other than the faulting out a couple times on 2 different axes the other day, it has worked perfectly for me. Is probably what I will do is buy a second machine when funds allow, convert/retrofit it up nice like then take a look at retrofitting this sucker. The more I look at it the more I think I'd be way out of my depth if I were to jump right in now.

[underthetire]

Axis alarms won't go away with a retrofit. When the knee mills are tuned correctly, the axis alarms usually go away, and they are a surprisingly accurate machine. I ran ball bar tests on those back in the day, and after just a small amount of tuning would hold a .0002" circle.

Once you get used to the dynapath, they are super quick and easy. Still one of my favorite controls to run.

[greggv]

I would replace these motors with ac servos and drives. You can check Automation Direct, they have great prices and good tech support. Their drives will take step and direction commands, which I think you can get from Mach3.