Replacement part for A.B. 1203-GK1 Series A or C

alive15

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Join Date
Oct 2015
Location
Montgomery, AL
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Good afternoon,

Does anyone know of any good replacement parts for the A.B. 1203-GK1? I called up our allen bradley distributor, but they don't have an official replacement. Wanted to see if anyone has succesfully found a good replacement option for this product? the 1203-gk1 has been obsolete for roughly 3 years, but we still have some at our plant and we should replace these eventually.

Thanks,
 
That one is also discontinued with no planned Rockwell Automation replacement, but the lifecycle status results page recommends:
Prosoft: AN-X2-AB-DHRIO

I'm not sure that makes sense, because IIRC, the 1203-GK1 is a RIO to Scanport adapter.

Just a matter of time afterall...I haven't installed one in more than 10 years...RIO is a dinosaur...

And the Prosoft EIP/RIO-DH+ gateway implementation would probably be a nightmare.

DeviceNet it is then: PF70 with 20-COMM-D...:D...

How much longer are you planning to keep those 1336s running?

What PLC platform are they running on?
 
PowerFlex 7-series with 20-COMM-R are a pain to reprogram. The most common setup of "1/4 rack for Command, Status, Reference, and Feedback" doesn't work the same as the 1336+/1336+II because the Block Transfer Control is always Word 0, so you always have to go edit your PLC-5 program to add block transfers, or shift I/O around to make room for a 1/2 Rack object and move all your data up by one register.

And 20-COMM-R is already out of production, because the problem was the availability of the RIO adapter components.

The 1203-GK1 adapters were very popular and very rugged. I would have no qualms about buying aftermarket units and relying on them for as long as my 1336+ drives and my RIO-based PLC controllers keep running.
 
Yes, we are using PLC-5s and we will run the 1336+ to the grave. We found some 1203-GK1s on e-bay and some extra ones lying around the plant which we are running for now. There are no plans to upgrade anything in it, it's more like wait until it goes down, replace the part, and keep it running kind of deal.

This brings up another important question, how do I deal with old machines and obsolete equipment? I have many 15+ year old machines with parts that may or may not be obsolete, and unsure how to deal with all these. Slowly but surely, we are replacing the oldest / most worn out machines. I'm unsure whether it's better to upgrade the controls on some machines or just buy a brand new one, or just run them till the very end. If we buy a new machine, we normally keep the old machine if it was still running as an offline unit, but if it's really broken down, we usually let setups / maintenance scavenge parts from it. There are a lot of different ways to go about doing this, but unsure which is the best.
 
This brings up another important question, how do I deal with old machines and obsolete equipment? I have many 15+ year old machines with parts that may or may not be obsolete, and unsure how to deal with all these. Slowly but surely, we are replacing the oldest / most worn out machines. I'm unsure whether it's better to upgrade the controls on some machines or just buy a brand new one, or just run them till the very end. If we buy a new machine, we normally keep the old machine if it was still running as an offline unit, but if it's really broken down, we usually let setups / maintenance scavenge parts from it. There are a lot of different ways to go about doing this, but unsure which is the best.

When I worked in a factory that had tons of obsolete parts and lots of ongoing and varied modifications in process, I ended up making a list and a drawing. The list was a spreadsheet to keep up with what machines had what done to them versus what was needed. I highlighed the needs in light red. On the drawing, it was sort of a block diagram "map" of my area with all the mods/obsolete parts highlighted.

I used those tools to
a) help me keep track of what was where and plan for what to tackle next
b) prioritize spare parts supplies
c) present to those who held the purse strings so that I could show them how bad it was, show them my progress, basically telling them which ones were going to bite us and cya so they could not say I didn't warn them if something went down "hard"

Sometimes it's really hard to plan a migration path that minimizes cost and downtime because those antiques string together like bad plumbing. It's like trying to replace one bad pipe elbow and creating three new leaks...before you know it, you've made three trips to Lowe's and replaced more than half the piping.
 
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I'll have similar issues a some point - I'm trying to upgrade stuff to EthernetIP before the failures strike.

The good news about using the 1203-GK1 is that if you have one with a newer revision (forget which), you can directly replace a 1336 or 1305 with a powerflex 70. As we were faced with dying 1305's and didn't have time for a full upgrade to CLX with Ethernet, we swapped the 1305's out for PF70's. Since most of the 1305 drives were setup as a 1/4 rack, a 20-COMM-R card was not an easy solution because it would require 1/2 rack or other games as Ken Roach referred to.

I will say that the 1203-GK1 have been very rugged. I ended up tossing a bunch that were the old rev. They all still worked for the 1305, but the plastic on them was so old that it crumbled upon being touched.
 

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