Orac cnc lathe

Derek,

The original ORAC control was not hugely user frienldy in this pc age, and spares are made of unobtainium. He would do better to replace the innards with a PC based control - send me a valid email address and I'll send you schematics of what I did with my ORAC. (BTW I no longer have it)

AWEM

Derek,

I'd agree with what Andrew says. I use an ORAC at work for small jobs

- our controller is the original and it works fine, but some of the G-Codes are non ISO standard, and it is a bit user-unfriendly and archaic to be honest, especially when it comes to editing and entering programmes. Compare this to our Denford Triac mill, which is a couple of years newer and which I've managed to hook up to Mastercam, to generate the G-Codes directly from CAD models!!!

I've also obtained a second ORAC for home use, and I'm in the middle of fitting a new controller and stepper drivers to it, based around Gecko drivers and the Mach3 software, where a PC will replace the hardware controller originally fitted. It's not a hugely complicated task - I'm a mechanical engineer and know very little about electronics (except Smoke=Bad) and am managing ok!!

It would certainly be worth looking into fitting a new controller as opposed to trying to do anything with the original

Cheers

Alastair

Andrew, Thanks for the reply. I'll leave my father in laws email if that's okay. His name is John and will probably understand more about the issue than I will. Note the obvious spam avoidance in the address. ( no spaces! )

john AT screw-conveyor.ltd.uk

Thanks Andrew, i'll pass on all posts directly so he can get the advise first hand, i'm just his "middle man" to the forum!

Alastair, thanks for your reply, will pass it on.