Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

I finally got together the budget, time and resolve to retrofit a dead a prototrak knee mill after thinking about it for years now. The old DC servos check out ok, and I am leaning towards changing out the encoders to usdigital E6 with 10000CPR which should be overkill, though I am still open to oth...

a lot of the proto trak dc servos (especially the early ones) were not that great of motors to begin with, if what you have are SEM or Baldors dc servos and in good condition then i would do the encoder retrofit upgrade. otherwise you might be better off buying new AC servos (or closed loop stepper...

i don't have the prototrak motor model numbers memorized :-) take the motor off the machine and open up the encoder cap and lets take a look inside. So what are we looking for to figure out if this is a motor worth keeping and moving forward with or setting aside for something completely different?...

Hi Keith, Up until now I have been intimidated by the thought of reusing the old prototrak motors as I have no wiring diagrams from Southwest but if I am understanding this correctly all I need to do is get the two power lines to the motors, new encoders and scrap the rest.. Is there anything I sho...

Hi Keith, Up until now I have been intimidated by the thought of reusing the old prototrak motors as I have no wiring diagrams from Southwest but if I am understanding this correctly all I need to do is get the two power lines to the motors, new encoders and scrap the rest.. Is there anything I shou...

I'm digging up an old post here, but I was wondering if you ever made a decision or what happened with your project? I'm in the same boat right now, I have an old Bridgeport style mill with a broken prototrak controller that is no longer supported. My thoughts were to strip the existing servo motors...

A few more photos if they're of any help. I popped open the cover to the motor control unit and here's what I found; https://i.ibb.co/s1tk5yz/control-unit.jpg Here's some of the wiring both to the motor and encoder; https://i.ibb.co/v4GHTH1/wiring.jpg If I am going to take on this project getting so...

I was recently given a Bridgeport style knee mill with a 2006 version of Prototrak Edge on it. The Prototrak controller fried a main board and is dead, but as far as I can tell the motors themselves are fine. At this point I am hoping I can figure out how to reuse the existing motors and put a new c...