Tree UP-1000 CNC lathe - plan of action - stripping out the control cabinet

So, what's the plan, Fatty?

I've had a good sniff around now and got a pretty good idea what it looks like and how it works. And here's what I plan to do:

• Strip out the control cabinet. There's nothing in there that I could possibly want to reuse apart from some DIN rail and possibly some barrier strip / terminal blocks.
• Remove (and scrap) the cabinet.
• Remove and scrap the massive steel framework.
• Remove and scrap the DC brushed spindle motor. I will simply use a 2850rpm induction motor of around 3.5kW with a 1:1-ish pulley ratio and a Yaskawa VFD.
• Possibly retain the hydraulic pump and controls that operate the collet closer, tailstock and ATC turret. Changing these over to electronic (or pneumatic?) control might be reasonably easy but would still require hours of pissing about. If the motor can be persuaded to run from a VFD, I could save a lot of ball ache. I have a couple of 5.5kW Extravert VFDs that could run a static-ish pump load.
• Retain the existing (presumably) brushed DC motors and (ballscrew mounted) encoders. Use the same cncdrive DG4S160-35 that worked on The Shiz, at 240 Euros for the pair. I can rewind a site transformer to get myself a 120Vdc bus voltage, as before.
• Use either LinuxCNC or Centroid Acorn to run the controls. I've persevered with LinuxCNC on the Bantam so far but TBH, the Acorn would just be a simpler solution and require less fucking about. The main downside would be the $300 cost of the wireless MPG but the rest of the system is actually fairly well priced. Including the pro licence and the MPG, it would come in at $800 including shipping.
• As for the ATC, it seems to require very little external control. There's a simple position feedback (encoder), a home switch and a solenoid for operating both the turret lock and advancing the turret. Given how simple this is, I may try powering up the hydraulic pump and firing up the solenoid to see what happens. I'm expecting the lock to withdraw and the turret to index but I'm not sure. The solenoid seems to power the hydraulic motor AND the turret lock. I'm wondering if there is some sort of hydraulic valve that controls the motor according to the position of the turret lock. The service manual I ordered from the US ebay site will hopefully tell me that when it finally arrives in a couple of weeks (hopefully).

So off we go:

Firstly, we need to let the dog see the rabbit, so let's heave that door off. The other one is inaccessible, so will have to wait until I can remove the cabinet and drag it out of the way. While I'm at it, here's the control panel housing, sans control panel, such as it was:

Nice orange colour. The hinges are welded to the main cabinet, so out with the angle grinder:

It's hanging on by a thread almost...

There. Gone.

I'll be keeping the nameplate and refitting it somewhere, later on, along with the Matchmaker sticker from the side of the cabinet.

Right - out with the old gubbins:

• Siemens drive.
• Servo amps.
• 3-phase transformers.
• Mains contactors.
• Forest of control relays.
• Controller.
• Miles of cables and wires.
• Dozens of cartridge fuses.
• Dozens of terminal blocks.
• Metres (yards?) of trunking.
• Paper tape reader.
• Several fans.
• 2 PSUs.
• Ground and neutral commoning strips.
• 3-phase transformers (x2).
• ...

Bloody hell. The guy had better not want his lathe back in working order is all I can say.

To be continued....