The Cincinnati Milacron Sabre VMC's are great machines and are worth retrofitting with a new Centroid CNC control system. Manufactured in the 90's these machines originally came with Fanuc OM, Acramatic and Siemens CNC controls.

This one is owned by Gum Springs Drilling Services in Morgantown, WV

With some CNC experience with other controls and no training on the Centroid, Greg Smith and his operator were able to setup the tools and program parts right on the new Centroid CNC control.

Greg makes big hole drilling equipment, these parts are teeth for the drilling head and will have carbide inserts pressed into the holes machined by the Sabre. During the retrofit Greg decided to add a Centroid CNC 4th axis rotary table to make this kind of work easier.

Any machine equipped with Fanuc axis motors is a great candidate for a Centroid CNC retrofit. Centroid has developed encoder upgrade kits for a wide variety of Fanuc servo motors. This allows the axis motors to be reused saving time and reducing the overall cost of the retrofit upgrade. Bill Myers of CNC Services East in Monaca, PA installed the Centroid M400 using the new Centroid AC/DC servo drives. The new drive is a powerful AC Brushless servo drive that can run a variety of servo motors. (and as the name implies the AC/DC drive can also run DC servo motors as well)

Fanuc Red cap servos are a reliable AC brushless servo motor with good power density. Being able to reuse the stock servos saves not only the cost of having to buy new axis motors which can be significant especially as the motor size goes up but, also saves the mechanical work required to adapt new motors to the machine. Parts like adapter plates and pulley (purchase or modification) can be avoided by reusing the stock Fanuc servos. click here for more info on the Centroid Fanuc CNC retrofit control system.

Bill was also able to retain the stock Fanuc spindle motor drive for further savings.

These machines are available for a song..the old outdated cnc controls are impossible to get parts for and hard to find anyone to work on them for a fair price The as-is value of a 90's Sabre is low, perfect for a retrofit. The iron is great, all it needs is a new Centroid CNC control to turn it back into a profit center.

Back at work with the new M400 in control, the Cincinnati Milacron Sabre is now simple to program, reliable and profitable.

A simple adapter was fabricated to go from the existing console support arm to the new M400 console swivel mount.