Project "
YOU Bit It Off, YOU chew it!" begins!
As a few of you already know, I recently won a Bridgeport Interact MDI on eBay, for £small_change. For reasons which I will explain at the end of this post, I didn't get that machine, but a slightly different one.... and it arrived today on the back of a lorry:
Hoik!
Plant!
Tada.wav! One Bridgeport Interact 1 Mk2 with Heidenhain TNC150 controller! Wahay!
Now the long and unnecessarily difficult task of recommissioning it starts.... I already began to clean it in the previous picture, WD40 everywhere (it's been out in the rain
).
It seems to be pretty much all there. There's a couple of clamps which hold the Z-axis motor - visible at the top of the previous picture - in place which are missing, I can fabricate those on the manual mill, as well as the 5/16" UNC bolts to hold it down if necessary. Because it's been sat in the rain, I had some warm air blowing into the cabinets:
Eeek!
EEEEEK!
Hopefully all that wonderful '80s electrickery stuff still works... Lots of big fat transformers and other 3-phasery.
I do have the covers, but I won't fit them until the machine is up and running. I hope to power it on at the weekend, that should be long enough for the WD40 to do its magic, and gives me time to make the clamps.
So... the Tale of Woe...
The machine I actually won was a Bridgeport Interact Series 2 MDI with Heidenhain TNC145 controller - a slightly smaller machine with a slightly older controller. After the auction (which specified "Machine must be removed in 3 days"), I contacted my favourite machine mover, determined he was pretty much available on spec, then utterly failed to contact the seller.... who FINALLY got in touch on the Friday (Auction ended on Tuesday) to tell me he'd promised the machine to someone else prior to the auction end, and when said person came to collect it turned out the X-axis motor & encoder were missing.
FFS & all that.
However, the same seller had this machine going. We did some haggling, and now it's both mine & here, and it's complete - there's only 1 cut wire (I think it's the light wire, as there's no work light on the machine), and apart from the missing brackets to hold the Z-axis motor down, it seems to be all there. So, fingers crossed, it'll all work, and not too much rain has got into the spindle or motor bearings to knacker them.
So... if you're looking at a machine from eBay seller "machinetools_rus" - be careful...
I may yet have nothing more than a lump of inert cast iron... but hopefully, so long as the motors & encoders are good, even if the old electronics have died I have a good friend who is a bit of an electronics genius, if only I can tear him away from his racing car...
