Bridgeport Series 1 CNC retrofit overview

Описание: This video is in response to a request from “ford man” a subscriber to my channel. It gives a very informal overview of the main components used to retrofit my Bridgeport Series1 CNC mill from the old Bridgeport BOSS series control, which originally drove large Stepper motors, to a modern control with servo motors.

Although these machines are dinosaurs from a Manufacturing efficiency standpoint, they are a great solution for a hobbyist that does not need an automatic tool changer, or 5 axes to be competitive in a production environment.



Although I used a fair amount of surplus parts for the conversion, there were a good amount of new parts as well. The list of parts that I used in the electronics enclosure can be seen here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D3JU...


My original schematic was created in Visio and is long gone from a corrupt Windows file system just before the drawing was finished. If you want to see how the electronics enclosure was laid out, you can see the enclosure layout here, which also includes most of the wiring assignments: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JYU9... You will need to download this file, and use a .DWG viewer or Autocad to open it.



The control software is Linuxcnc, which sends signals to the Stepper drives from the old parallel printer port: http://www.linuxcnc.org

The servo drives are Geckodrive G340 from: http://www.geckodrive.com/

The Breakout board is from Probotix: http://www.probotix.com/CNC-CONTROL-S...

All of the other components like relays, connectors, power supplies and terminal strips were sourced individually as surplus, or leftovers from other projects. None of these are critical service related components. Everything in this enclosure is quite modular and replaceable, so it is a pretty easy machine to service, from a control standpoint.

If you have more detailed questions about the retrofit, ask them in the comments and I will answer as best I can.