CNC mill coming in for landing!

It has been a great weekend! Weeeeeee

This 33 year old Bridgeport BOSS 5 CNC milling machine just found a new home after sitting idly for 10 years in Buda, TX. It is in excellent condition, but it's not currently 1978 so excellent is not going to "cut it" if you get my drift. Approximately 400ish pounds of perfectly good electronics (including a hole punch type tape  reader) will be removed and replaced with modern motor controllers and a desktop PC that's lying around somewhere. Existing pneumatic controls for both motor/spindle brake and power actuated variable speed spindle (belt type CVT) will be commanded by a new PC Breakout and board (BOB) on top of the existing relays. Possibly/definitely expecting to see a servo driven lathe chuck/rotary table combo which makes the 4th axis, and opening vast opportunity in machining capability. This is a fun challenge because the chuck rotation must range from 1 RPM to 2000ish RPM while retaining .001" rotational accuracy on the face of a 6" diameter part. The high RPM allows for lathe style cutting operations. I'm hoping the following sentence combined with the auto spindle brake will allow strong lathe cutting.  A custom PID controller must be set up using an angular "encoder" attached to the spindle shaft. This will finely control the position of the spindle and allow the cutting tool to stop on a dime, and then reverse with sufficient angular accuracy in order to tap holes automatically. Yeah that's going to be fun :-/

MEOW