Oak retrofit on a Brother TC-22A milling machine

[LarsB]

Hello there,

I have an opportunity to buy a Brother TC-22A from 1998 with 13500 hours on it. It has a 12 krpm spindle and a 26 pos tool-changer.

So my question is if someone has done this before? When asking Centroid about this the feedback was that it should be doable but no guarantee the the servo drive tuning will be successful. So that's why I ask you guys here.

So for X, Y and Z there are three equal servo drives, Sanyo Denki PE9A050UXXXC01 and on Z axis a Sanyo Denki AC Servomotor BL Super P10B10120HCSB1.
The X and Y motors were not easily reachable to find any label, but they might be the same.

Pictures of drives and Z-motor label attached as well as the coupling between Y-axis ball screw and servo motor. Reason for coupling picture is if someone recognize the type and can advise in case of replacing motors and drives and go for Hickory instead of Oak.

As for the spindle that's also a servo motor in this case, a Sanyo Denki 64BM180LXSA9 driven by a Sanyo Denki PY9A300U0XXXC08 servo driver.
I guess that can be used since I think it has +-10 V velocity input and encoder outputs to be fed back to Oak, but that's just guessing...

Then there are three other servo amplifiers for a 4'th and a 5'th axis and one for the tool magazine. Those are Sanyo Denki BL Super PV1C015MXXXC00, don't have any info about the motors here, but there is both a single 4*th axis (Nikken CNC180) and a 4+5 axis attachment included in the deal, see pictures.

So, does anyone have an opinion about chances of success with this kind of project?
Have some previous experience with Acorn on an Emco PC55 lathe.
And decent knowledge about programming, quite good at how electrical systems work and can handle oscilloscopes and multimeters...
But I also know that much that there's a lot of things I don't know - so these kind of forums can be very helpful.

Any input is welcome!

Thanks in advance!

/Lars

[cncsnw]

See if you can find a manual for the servo drives, which documents the control interface.

Generally, decent-quality velocity-mode drives of that era can be made to run reasonably well with an Oak.

The presence of "address" selectors on the XYZ drives -- each set to a different value -- is a little worrying. That suggests that the control interface may be a digital data bus instead of discrete contact closures and analog signals. Hence the need for the manual.