FS: Bandit I CNC I/O Communications Manual

My first CNC control was a Bandit. It even had 30K of memory for program storage! Taught me to write efficient looping gcode!

Karl

30 years ago I ran a lathe with the bandit control. The lathe had just been upgraded from stepper to servo motors. This was a 10 HP, 21 inch swing Cadillac lathe. The control was actually pretty good except that it would on random occasions index the turret. I had some pretty spectacular wrecks when the turret tried to index in the middle of a cut. The solution was to disconnect the air supply to the turret. When a tool change was called for I would shove the air line onto the quick disconnect I put into the turret air line and then unplug the air as soon as the index was complete. The service guy was able to determine that the fault was somewhere in the main control board and my boss determined that it was too expensive to fix so I ran the machine anyway, waiting for tool changes. This taught me to think about tool changes and how to avoid them. Putting my chucker experience to good use I used lots of gang tooling. I still have a 7 tool gang setup from back then that I used to make tens of thousands of plastic scuba parts. Eric