"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote:

Ignoramus18335 fired this volley in
:

You have to be essentially a CNC machine designer, make a lot of
things fit that do not want to fit, make and mount a lot of brackets,
doodads, switches. Also you need to buy servo motors.


Ig, I take your advice seriously, but I have the advantage that they have
already converted one of these. Only two small issues must be resolved
on my end:

I must make a ball nut bracket for each of the Z and Y feeds, and I must
add thrust bearings to the ends of the screw brackets to take out end
play. They have motor mounts and couplers designed to purpose, and the
adaptor plates and couplers only add about $50 to the total bill --
saving me much layout and machining time.

I have pretty much exhausted the near-regional used CNC lathe market
looking for anything that doesn't have so much wear as to require a full
screw and motor upgrade (and way scraping), and I think I'd rather do the
conversion. I intend not to kill the manual functions until everything
is ready (although I'll probably do several disassemblies and re-
assemblies of everything before I'm done).

Things like mounting limit switches are just not that much of a
challenge.

As for mistakes? Yeah... but they're all "recoverable", so long as I
don't invest in motors or ball screw assemblies that are sub-standard.
To that end, I'll be using some proven motors, and precision-ground
screw/nut combinations. The precision of rolled screws just leaves me
cold -- 0.003" per foot is crazy sloppy.


I've only seen two used lathes in my area in two years, and you
wouldn't have wanted either of them. At least one was scrapped because
it needed so much work.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid™ on it, because it's
Teflon coated.