Hurco KMP3 retrofit

I picked up this mill several years ago and documented my challenges on another forum. No need to re-hash that here but I'll answer any questions. Long story short there was some trial to get it working but after a few weeks things started failing one at a time. I intended to retrofit it immediately but got caught up in life stuff and pushed it to the corner of the shop. Now it's been dug back out and it either has to get retrofitted and be productive or it has to go somewhere else.

I did another small retrofit on a small mill to see if I even had the ability and it worked out OK so that gave me some confidence to tackle this one. Link to that if you're interested.

https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...bs-512-a-75782

Here's a picture of the Hurco.

Attachment 33890

Place that I worked sometime back had 3 Hurcos, two KMP3 and one with an auto tool changer. Loved the things--but they were brand new, and every upgrade was fitted right away, money seemingly no object

Wow. I wish I was able to buy new machines and then upgrade them. I'm lucky if I can afford an old broken down one :)

I started in the control cabinet.

Before
Attachment 33971

After
Attachment 33972


Yikes! No turning back now :cool:

What kind of control are you going to substitute? Shame that you couldn't get the Hurco control to co-operate with you. They are the most intuitive, easy to program and modify program on the fly. Very few "gotcha's" (when they work right) Downside was they seemed to need a new screen --one or the other (had two) every 3000 hours, and we were told to leave them on 24/7, Ran two shifts.

To start off I'll be using Mach3 because I already have it and a little experience with it. If it get some spindle time and feels adequate I'll look into upgrading to something else.

Not a lot to show but a little progress has been made.

PMDX and Geckos mounted.

Attachment 34812



Encoders mounted and wired.

Attachment 34813



Limit / home switch bracket made and wired.

Attachment 34814