Maho MH400C Retrofit

Hi,

First of all, sorry for my poor english, it not my first language...

Ok, so a little bit of back story ... Since I am very young, I always wanted a cnc milling machine, it was my big dream since I saw a cnc router build on youtube something like 8 years ago. (Yeah, I am still very young) I have been looking on my local craiglist and going to auction for 3 years without finding what I want, and finally, 14 month, I found a 1982 Maho MH400C on my local that come from a school for 1200$ because the controller was dead. This was the perfect deal, because they could load it on the trailer and the machine only 800 hours. The only problem was that I did not have the place for the huge control panel (the 6 foot electrical box).



The machine was very nicely equiped

• 4 Rotary Axis
• Big Flat Table
• Horizontal milling overarm
• Lot of tooling
• Lot of documentation

So my plan was the following :
Remove the electrical box and redo all the electronic with modern stuff (and all on 240v)

When I removed the panel in less than 3 hours (before my mother see this monster), I did not have any idea what I was getting into. My idea was basically to redo all the electronic, replace the axis drive and make custom one ( I am studying electrical engineering), replace the motor with a 3ph with a vfd. Easy no ?



So here the story start

The first thing to do was to actually get the machine, I had to rent a trailer and borrow my mother F150 and miss of day of classes. The guy where I bought it from were remplacing all the equipments with new hass machine so they hired riggers that could load the old machine on my trailer. I lost the picture of my mill flying 150feet in the air suspended by the biggest crane I ever saw but belive me it was impressive. Here is some picture of the mill once I got it home:





Then is was time to unload it. It was raining quite badly so the first step was to install a tent over it (as you can see in the pictures). To make my life easier, I put it on 2 6x6 timber and tie the mill to the 6x6. My goal was to unload pull-it until I could pickup the extremity of the timber with my mother little tractor and then pull it more, jack the other side, and move the trailler.



I then get into a small problem, the trailler wheels could not support the weight of the machine behing at the back and my trailor could not even pick-up half the weight ... So I end up jacking everything ...

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