[fle33.com]

Hi Everyone. I just bought an old 1981 Textron / Bridgeport Interact Series 1, with Heidenhain TNC 145 controller. Hasnt been run in ages so I am seeing whats workiung and whats busted. I have not made any chips yet... but want to cut some aluminium for a job. soonlike.
The sump area seems to have about 1" of oil in there. This is my first milling machine so I don't know if this is accumulated way oil, or if coolant has separated and this is whats left?
What should I do? I have not run the sump pump yet, don't even know if it does run, but I think I will;
Suck out as much of the stuff from the sump as I can. And dispose of it.
Fill it with?? Water? or some other light solvent and pump it through to see what clears out.
Refill it with coolant.

Sound sensible??

[xxcar2]

I have a Series 1 Interact (TNC2500); it was full of a couple of inches of way oil with fine chips on the bottom (even though the machine was almost like new)--it's probably way oil, if it feels like oil. I don't even think the pump had ever been used. I scooped, and then scraped all that mess out by hand, when I got to the bottom I used some mineral spirits, stiff brushes scrapers and lots of cloth (cussing all the while). Anyway, I haven't even used the coolant for prototyping purposes; I haven't done any extra heavy duty hogging on aluminum, or steel. I use squirt and squeeze bottles with coolant, vacuum, brushes (WD40 for aluminum a lot) most of the time to apply coolant, and just take it easy (I'm doing mostly prototypes so the time isn't a huge factor). If you want to use the pump, I think I'd take it out of the column and put it on a separate exterior tank--that arrangement inside the column is a PITA.

So, if you want to cut some chips and try things out/troubleshoot, don't worry about the coolant for the time-being, it's not needed and won't affect the learning/troubleshooting.

I always feed the TNC ISO programs from Visualmill, so I'm not much help on the Heidenhain programming or nitty gritty details of the 145. It took some learning curve to get all the info to get mine "productive". Manuals, programming and setting vagaries/formatting, cables, transfer program (TNC server, available on the Heienhain site), POST issues, replacing caps in the CRT, etc etc., but it's been working great thus far (had to replace the Omron 208-in, 24vdc out unregulated power supply (cheap item on Fleabay)), and holds good tolerances (for a knee mill (+/- .003")) without too much problem).