Thanks for the responses, everybody. It's encouraging. Why did I buy it? It came out of a folded up business and at a price not a hell of a lot more than scrap value. I've never tried 'CNC' before, I was taught 'mandraulic' – a long, long time ago and only ever used that since. So I thought: 'What the hell!' 'I'll have a go'.
I've got the Heidenhain (TNC 151, or 155 series) manual for it but, sadly, not the Parkson bit. I know lathes.co.uk do some manuals but not yet sure how near they get to this one. I'd guess it must be one of the last of this series produced. There's no nod in the direction of manual reversion because having popped a couple of covers off there are no sockets for handles, apart from the right hand end of the table appears to have something of the sort. It seems from previous posts that it's probably salvageable, even if it's a question of going for a modern electronics transplant.
On the bright side, I've got 3 phase in the workshop – a legacy of an ancient offer of it coming in at the same price as single phase when the house was built, so the guy installed 3 phase (15Kw, blown air) heating as well.
There's what looks like a serious transformer behind another panel under the main motor at the back, so I guess it's where the 170 volts comes from. Next time I uncover it, I'll look at the servo motors, etc, for maker's labels.
The first thing I have to do is get the overarm lowered so I can get it through the door. It doesn't appear to be 'plug and play', with multi-cored cables running up the inside of the arm's box section and indivually connected and tagged onto long connector blocks in the control cabinet. I'm also guessing that old fashioned CRT is pretty heavy.
One interesting bit I've found is a B.Ae. label on it, Guess it's probably one of their cast-offs from the 90s? It looks a very well built item, just looks really massive because of all the panels covering up the drives. Quite a few are fibreglass.
Will