help - mill project - Bridgeport Series I CNC

A friend of mine purchased an old Bridgeport Series I CNC off from
Ebay last fall. We are just getting around to working on it. He
already purchased the appropriate Gecko Drives (stepper type) and
Gecko tweaked them to handle more amps if I remember right.

He's purchased a phase converter for his shop. It's a 220AC to 3
phase converter. I think it was about $350. We think this power is
low quality though so he is trying to find how much it will cost to
run 440AC (3 phase) from his irragation pump feed.

Are we on the right road? We tried making the machine move (while it
was wired for 440) and the keypad etc was not responsive. He told me
he rewired the power supply stuff for 220 (there is a diagram on the
mill apparently) and the keypad numbers were responsive, ie numbers
came up on the LED. He still hasn't got the spindle spinning though
and seems to be making humming noises. The phase converter
instructions say something about putting a big motor on it to just
spin. Also says something about the biggest motor has to be running
before smaller motors. It seems the 440AC line from the pump is the
way to go. Can someone comment on this?

We will be gutting all the old controls in favor of a LinuxRT system
running NIST's EMC through the Gecko Drives. We are Linux programmers
so this is something we *do* know something about. But should we be
gutting the power system to? In favor of something like this
http://web.cuug.ab.ca/~fortuned/cnckits/ ?

Thanks for any help or comment
-Scott