When confronted with the supply of free machining gear, there isn’t any real looking option to say ‘no’. That is how [Anthony Kouttron]’s brother [Thomas] bought to select up a big Nineties-era CNC machine as a brand new companion for his rising assortment of such gear. The trickiest a part of the transfer to the brand new location was getting the machine to suit by the barn doorways, requiring some impromptu disassembly of the Z-axis meeting, which required using an engine crane and a few effective changes with the reinstallation. With that [Thomas] and [Anthony] bought to gawk at their new prize in its new house.
This Millport vertical mill is successfully a Taiwanese clone of the Bridgeport vertical mill design, although utilizing an imported servo management system from Anilam. Probably the most thrilling half a few CNC machine like that is often the electronics, particularly for a well-used machine. Fortuitously the AT-style PC and enlargement playing cards seemed to be in respectable situation, and the mill’s CRT-based controller popped up the AMI BIOS display earlier than booting into the Anilam S1100 CNC software program on high of MS-DOS, all working off a 1 MB Flash card.
Which isn’t to say that there weren’t some points to be mounted. The Dallas DS12887 real-time clock/NVRAM module on the mainboard was after all useless. After changing it, the BIOS lastly remembered the suitable boot and enter settings, in order that the CNC machine’s personal controls might be used as a substitute of an exterior keyboard. This simply left determining the Anilam controls, or so that they thought, as a spread of latest errors popped up about X-lag and the Distribution Board. This had [Anthony] do a deep-dive into the electronics cupboards to wash metallic chips and restore damaged components and floating pins. After this and a substitute Anilam Encoder this Millport vertical mill was lastly able to be put again into service.