MAHO is Filthy!! (Whose Milling Machine Isn't?)

[Music] [Music] stand back don't get too close although I'm usually totally fine with hugs I'm a hugs person me personal space su personal space I'm sick I don't want you to catch anything my intention was to publish a follow-up to last week's TIG welding video in fact part of me is still sitting here at the bench going on and on about aluminum waveforms or something or other but like I said I managed to get sick not to worry I checked with my multimeter I think I'm fine according to the numbers I'm pretty sure I'm gonna live which is fortunate because I have one heck of a project ahead of me now that we got my full medical history out of the way I don't have a welding follow up video for you but I do have some mildly exciting news I bought a German phrase machine ax that's right another old piece of junk I have absolutely no space for friends countrymen I'd like you to meet my ho that might actually be pronounced Maho may ho not sure not German this is a model mhm 400 P and apart from recognizing that as a jumble of letters and numbers I have no idea what that means I have an educated guess for what the P stands for but I'll save that for later before coming across this one I'd never heard of Maho or Meho before let alone the 400 though if you're interested there are a couple of 600 s and a 700 on eBay right now in any event this is an older CNC mill that's seen better days travels by the book are 400 millimeters by 250 millimeters by 375 I know what you're thinking is my wife asked me the same exact question old Tony don't you already own a freeze machine ax I most certainly do a beautiful Shaolin 13 so you needed another one does a pope mil wear a funny hat I got this mill from the same machine dealer who sold me to Shaolin I guess he figured he knew the perfect sucker to dump this on the good news is I paid less than 40 cents a pound the bad news is it weighs a lot of pounds if all goes well that old milling machine may replace my CD router I don't want to make any promises but that's the intention you see the router is starting to show somewhere I guess that's what I get for buying all the cheapest import hardware I could find to put into this thing on top of that I've pushed it through more than its fair share of Steel I did sit down with the intention of upgrading the screws and slides and even started looking into a real spindle when it dawned on me even if I did all that I'd still have a router at that point I figured old Tony quit screwing around and just get a CNC mill I started window-shopping and wouldn't you know it they're really expensive so I'm back to screwing around but hey at least it's cheaper in the short term let's take a quick tour of the mill I'll tell you what I really like about it and give you a few reasons for the buyers or more sets eating me alive right now what attracted me to this mill is that it's already sort of CNC and it's not really that big physically it's not that big but it's sort of CNC and it was cheap it's got an old hidin hain TNC one twenty four I believe this if I'm not mistaken it would do single axis at a time two point five D machining I didn't really care frankly but because of that I assumed this machine had ball screws which it doesn't it has what appeared to be regular trapezoidal which might be a problem I won't know the whole story until I get in there and see how much space I have to work with second I got this without really taking a close look at it whereas closer look as I would have liked to I took a drive out to see it but it was packed in behind dozens if not more of other metalworking machines and I didn't really have a lot of access not to mention it's completely covered in weird grime and I didn't really want to touch it you should count yourselves fortunate that you can't smell what this thing smells like it's hard to put into words but imagine if you will a hundred-year-old senior citizen robot with an incontinence problem sitting in an old adult robot diaper that really needs changing oh it also didn't work did I even mention that the mill as the liver didn't work the story was it did work when they got it but when I asked him to power it up it blew the breakers right out of their fuse boxes red flag you say maybe but again my plan was to convert this thing so I didn't really care about electrical problem two things really pulled me in first mechanically this thing feels great well the X&Y do anyway z-axis I haven't really gotten a chance to check out it has a sheared key or something or I don't know what I'm doing I can't get this thing to budge but check this out I can move the table with almost zero effort using just a four millimeter allen wrench if my choice of X Y and z-axis have raised an eyebrow I feel your pain not what I would usually expect but it's got a picture on it that's hard to argue with I guess the OEM didn't care to consider the access shift due to the vertical head you just called the top of this Z because the horizontal spindle bore I guess second until I got my hands on it anyway the table in ways don't have you and so much as a ding or a scratch in them I cleaned off some small sections and from what I can see anyway mechanically it looks pretty darned good for its age backlash at least in the center of the y axis and the center of the table motion is less than a quarter millimeter going by the dials but still that's like eighth or ninth out not great for CNC but a manual machine this old that's pretty good this has got to be I don't know late 70s maybe early 80s I'm not a hundred percent I even got the original manuals when does that happen unfortunately though it looks like all the letters got jumbled up and transit that and this isn't the manual from my machine it's for an MH 600 I've got mechanical drawings for the whole machine by the machine I mean the MH 600 so I don't know how much good these will do me but aren't these things beautiful I bet they look even better right side up that's the hand wheel maybe for x-axis again different machine might get dis laminated turned it into a poster for the garage stamped twelve juni 1974 well so you know what I just learned like literally last night Meho or Maho is the M in dmg mori pretty sweet huh I've got some pedigree on my hands with the machine I also got another crate that I was told was the electronics that belonged to a sister machine was scrapped like they had two of the same exact machines and they gutted all the smarts before recycling the cast iron before I bought this and they told me about the extra crate when I crack the top open the first thing I saw were these two servo motors so I thought sweet this thing's got servo motors the conversion should be pretty straightforward or you know more conversion friendly but the MH 400 isn't a servo machine so I'm assuming these parts came from the same place those manuals did from some poor MH 600 before it was sent to the great machine shop in the sky so they only just dropped this off well I guess two days ago now I've only had a few hours to mess around with it I was curious to see if I could figure out what was wrong I was hoping to just find a fuse or two in here you know something I could just stick a penny in and problem solved and if it looks to you like someone's been in there already well they have that someone with me as soon as I got this in the door and untied I powered it up and sure enough blew the breaker it left me in complete darkness man just to get the lights back on dried my tears put on some coffee and did a bunch of staring slowly it started to not look so bad just a bunch of contactors and relays really there were a couple of blown fuses at the top I just jumpered past them they're like prehistoric ceramic fuses I don't even know where I'd find those things anymore couple of contactors that needed resetting but it started all looking not that bad power to back up pop the breakers again then I noticed some water in the bottom of the cabinet damp spots this thing at some point got rained on and I started to suspect this transformer when it don't on me that this isn't a step-down transformer I assume it took power down to run pumps or motors or the controller I don't know but on closer inspection the power went in and it came right out maybe power conditioning power factor matching or some other word related transformers that I don't know the meaning of so he took this completely out of the circuit I wired right past it probably not the safest way to do it but there you have it and just like that the mill powered up now I had mixed feelings when that happened I mean first I was excited elated but also kind of worried suspicious I just jumpered past arguably the largest component in the electrical cabinet and the machine turned on I mean I'm no electrolysis but I don't think and stuff like that just for kicks consequently I've been very cautious about touching this thing while it's powered up and again in the long term it doesn't really matter because I plan to gut that entire cabinet out but having some control at this stage is good for sort of debugging figuring out what's up with the machine like I said most of it seems to work the hydraulics are working spindle Direction coolant pump doesn't seem to work the power drawbar seems okay it's got apparently some sort of spindle break this also works and it's got what I think are lock outs for X Y & Z this up here is the motion control feed rates rapid spindle speed override it looks like but I haven't been able to get any of that to work the controller even worked the screen came on I got CNC ish menus in German I mean it worked in that I was getting dro feedback on the screen when I moved the machine handles around unfortunately however that didn't last long 15 minutes into trying to figure out how to change the language on the controller I heard a pop and this power brick started spitting out a lot of smoke boy the dead ever smelled good it was sitting in the bottom I dug it out it's still sort of wet I should have really checked before I do all of this this doesn't appear to be om to me and I'm sure if I found an equivalent power brick I could power that thing back on but I'm not going to burn too much time with that old controller and I don't think that should stop me from being able to power feed the axes on this machine and this is where most of the mechanical clockwork lives it's got a hydraulic unit at the top a single motor I think that runs X Y and z-axis and an automatic oiler at the bottom I was very excited to find an automatic oiler in this thing that both worked and still had oil in it I haven't looked into it but I'm willing to bet just this system alone is worth what I paid for the whole pile of junk here this is run by a timer in this control cabinet every time the machine gets a power interrupt like when you first turned it on for example it runs for about ten seconds or so also any time you do a reset from the control panel like you've hit the East stop the machine will stop but the oiler comes to life again 5 10 15 seconds or so I'm willing to bet this is the reason the machine still feels so good today it takes the human element out of a variant maintenance tasks for machine tool which is kind of sad in a way this is the hydraulic power plant it's got four solenoid valves a tank and inside the tank is a I guess a small hydraulic pump this was the thing that was making all the racket when I turn on the hydraulics I'm not sure why bad pump maybe or might just be low on hydraulic oil but when I first saw this when I took this cover off and saw that this was here scared the poop out of me at first I was worried that this was hydraulic motion control I mean I don't know if that's a thing on mills I know this kind of stuff exists on surface grinders for example but if the hydraulics were integral to the motion control the machine my whole conversion plan would have been shot so when it turned out to not be that I got all excited that maybe this made the machine jump up and down when I put on some sick beats unfortunately it doesn't do that either one of these lines the top line goes to the power drawbar but whatever clamping system in there is hydraulically powered obviously these other three took a minute for me to figure out but it looks like they're lockouts for each axis XY and Z so I guess when this thing was doing c and c and running just one axis at a time it would lock out the other two and trust me when I say lock out I mean really lock out when these things are on energized those axes just will not budge undecided what to do with this I don't need the axis lock outs anymore but keeping the power drawbar hydraulics would save me a lot of trouble if I can quiet this thing down I'll keep it there just omit these other lines otherwise I'll try to go to pneumatic add an air cylinder at the top and see if I can use that to actuate the power drawbar the other downside of this is it's slow tool changes would probably be like a minute and that oh so dapper looking baby blue pancake motor that you see I think that's what moves the axes you make it out down there it's geared up there's a timing belt and a large pulley at the bottom that goes into the base of the machine on the right at the bottom that's the coolant pump you can ignore that in that open electrical box at the top is some kind of electromechanical pressure control for the hydraulic system this motor being here is the real bummer I was hoping each axis would have its own just again so my conversion would be easier and I don't know for sure just an educated guess I assume that motor probably runs all the time and then the hydraulics above it based on commands sent from the control panel actuate some sort of system of clutches and locks that send that power to the axis that you're trying to move or that the controller wants to move based on the g-code it's not super elegant but I suppose it worked again this thing has glass scales dro on each axis so the controller can keep track of you know where your part in your tool are where the machine is going I don't know why that motor won't power up says the guy who gutted the largest component out of the control panel maybe it's the motor maybe it's the relay maybe it's some combination of the controls I don't know what I'm doing at that control panel but again I'm not too worried about it all this stuff will go away I'm gonna start to dig into the base take this machine apart see where I can start fitting my own steppers and servos so that's it maybe not my most exciting video but just thought I'd do a quick share don't expect to see results on this soon it's gonna take me quite some time to tear it down clean it up get rid of all that old robot pee smell gut out what I don't need etc definitely a winter long project fall goes well but with any luck with another couple of grand and some work I might end up with a decent CNC mill it certainly won't be the fastest phrase machine on YouTube but it'll be my phrase machine ax thanks for watching

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 657,085

Rating: 4.9641209 out of 5

Keywords: milling machine conversion, cnc conversion, maho, mh400p, mh-400-p, maho milling machine, DMG Mori

Id: Ogwp7zD59og

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019