05/09/2026
This was an older Cincinnati hydrotel vertical milling machine. Which according to the books was made around 1945 and showed first owner as the US Navy. It had an older Linux centroid control on it that just decided it did not want to work anymore. And the customer was having a hard time finding someone to upgrade it. So we took out the Linux control and put a new centroid M400 Oak system, Windows 11 PC. It had old SCR drives - we took them out and put in centroid AC/DC 60 drives. This retrofit had a lot of challenges. We reused the existing Gould DC servo Motors but had them all rebuilt, and had to add encoders to the back end of them . No one had ran this style motor before so we had to figure out all the tuning to get the Servo Drive to work well with the motors, customer had no electrical diagrams for the machine , the control that was on it had a bad hard drive so we were not able to pull any of the existing systems parameters or PMC program out of it. A lot of wires on the machine with no wire numbers. Nothing that makes for an easy quick retrofit was there. But I'm happy to say now it runs again and the customer is excited to make use of the machine again.
