Sorry, I know I have posted this several times before. But, we really could use some help. This is going on now for a long time, I start to wonder if I will be buried with this machine. We are prepared to pay for a solution, any experts reading this please reply or send PM.

The control is a Sinumerik 3T. We are just a start up company and bought a machine with the promise that it worked. No such luck... After 9 months of slogging through various problems we are approaching the finish line but have lots of trouble finding help. The machine was bankrupt stock and was really badly uninstalled. Cables were just chopped with bolt cutters, etc. All this happened after we paid of course... We have cleared all the hardware alarms, everything from the chuck to the tailstock, and even had the machine running very briefly and it was beautiful.

The last problem we fixed was the contour monitoring problem, which we eventually found was down to some bad relays on one of the boards. After swapping them around we had the machine running. Finished, great! Such a happy few hours. I took out the board with the dodgy relays and sourced a replacement board and also some new relays for our own board, so we would have 2 of them.

I left the board out of the machine over night, and the next day completely forgot this and stupidly tried to fire it up without the board in. The machine's fans spun up, then down, then back up again. No idea if this was related to the missing board, or a power outage or something.

Now, we have the PLC/computer turning on as normal. But, now the main relay no longer comes on and none of the other familiar clicks that used to signal the machine powering up. We still have the original parameters of the machine, we have tried many procedures to restart the PLC, and now I wonder if I accidentally wiped the parameters, but even then, the control panel should come on...

Can anyone please, please give an idea where to look for whatever we just did. We really need this machine to work, unlike the jerk we bought it off I cannot in good conscience just palm this off on someone else, and we can't afford to scrap it. The most frustrating thing is, this machine is built like a tank and the few hours we had it running, it was like silk.