my cnc project mill

Hi guys,

Thought I would share my cnc mill experiences thus far:

I bought a 7000lb shizuoka B-3V cnc bedmill a few months ago for
$2500 that had a bad spindle drive ($7500 replacement cost for new
drive) and a Fanuc 6MB control missing one of the cpu chips. Rather
than spend a lot of money getting the Fanuc control up and running
(and trying to interface a new spindle drive with the old 6M
controls), I decided to sell all the controls and retrofit the
machine with a PC based control. This is very funny, but I ended up
selling the 6MB controls (just the controls mind you) for over
$3000! I bought some Gecko G340 drives ($140) which seem to run the
model 0 and model 5 (z axis) fanuc dc brush motors just fine. I
removed the control panel with the 9 inch green phospor monitor and
replaced it with a 15" VGA lcd monitor ($300). I replaced the bad
spindle drive with a KB255 4 quadrant regenerative drive ($359). I
bought a small VFD on ebay ($60) to run the 3 phase spindle coolant
pump (yep, this mill has a 5HP spindle motor and oil that circulates
constantly through the bearings and geared head).

So, I am just finishing the first part of this conversion up, and I
am pretty happy so far. If I don't count the original cost of the
mill, I think I have made about $1500 by converting it...now that is
not something you hear everyday, huh?

Admittedly, I am not going to have all of the functionality of the 6M
control (for example, I don't have plans to use the 20 tool ATC right
now because EMC does not have that support), but I do have a control
that is cheap to repair and one that I know inside and out because I
built it.

I'll post a picture when I get it done.

Rick