[teamtiki]

Hello,

I Have a vintage textron Bridgeport Series 1 Boss4. Purchased from a school shop, it sat for a few years in storage, and a few years ago I got it running with a hillbilly BOB and an old junk Xp Windows machine. Worked fine for about a year till the Y axis driver burnt out. I replaced that driver with a Gecko and a cheap power supply and that was fine for a while. Anyway the PC sat for a while and the bios battery died, when i powered it back up a strange things started happening. The Y axis cuts too big, and also has trouble holding position. I've asked around, but no good leads on where to even look to try and fix this problem.

Instead of trying to replace suspect components one by one... is there a recommended system to replace the whole thing. Upgrade to servos....

I CENTROID CNC controls,CNC Controller, CNC Retrofits,CNC Milling Machines,CNC Lathes,CNC Routers,5 Axis CNC Cylinder Head Porting Machines,CNC Rotary Tables,Fanuc Retrofits,Digitizing Probes,Conversational Programming has a nice looking kit for around $6K USD. Are there any other options?

6K is getting really close to the smaller Tormach, or could potentially buy a older big machine...

-TT

[boss4]

I am browsing through the first few pages of posts and I know this is 4 months old so may be no longer relevant.

When I retrofitted my mill i used DMM tech 750 watt AC servos in step direction mode with off the shelf timing pulleys purchased from misumi. The only thing I had to make where adapter plates to go from nema 34 to 42. My initial adapter plates where made from 1/4" aluminum (hand drilled). If you went this route you could continue using the same control that you're using now. I think the total cost was about $1600.

In retrospect I wish I would have stepped up to the next larger servo size but it works great, and can do rapids at 500 inches per minute good acceleration (1000 ipm/m) and will fault if a crash or accident happens on any axis.