bridgeport series 1 interact

[john.t.little1]

hey guys i have a chance to pick up a bridgeport series 1 with interact with heidenhain tic 151 controller. any thoughts on this machine? it looks to be in good shape and ill definitely be testing it out before i purchase it. just looking for input from y'all.

[CMV]

As long as you aren't used to a series II or expecting it to act like a series II.

[john.t.little1]

never operated either

[wp6529]

That's going to be a pretty old control and pretty expensive to repair if/when it craps out. You can probably expect to run it for a while, but long term a conversion to something like LinuxCNC or Mach3 will be in order. Such a conversion will probably run around $250-750-ish depending on whether you have a suitable PC on hand, which options you select, etc. Also the current controller probably has a pretty small memory so if you are using CAD/CAM generated G-code particularly stuff like engraving which produces large files you may need to "drip feed" the control from a PC to overcome memory limitations.

My larger Lagun CNC mill is similar, with a Dynapath control that currently works fine but has feeble memory. I drip feed from a PC for now and later this year will be doing a conversion to LinuxCNC. I have the PC on hand, LinuxCNC is free and the I/O boards I'm using (Mesa 5i25/7i77) run around $300, so the conversion will be more time and effort than $ and I'll also be adding 4th axis while I'm at it.

I recently got a smaller CNC lathe without a working control and I'm in the final stages of rebuilding it to LinuxCNC as well. Total time will probably be about a month overall to do the conversion, partly due to experience, but it's really not that bad if you have some electronics and CNC knowledge.

Look at this site: http://igor.chudov.com/projects/Bridgep ... -CNC-Mill/ and do some searching on CNCzone.com to get an idea of what is involved in a conversion.