Marquip Servo

[macona]

You might look at the Kflop. A friend just bought one and it looks a lot better than the smooth stepper. Does cost a bit more though, but I think it will be worth it.

[ironmonger]

Thanks for the lead. Thats quite a nice looking board. Not that much more than a smooth stepper.

I will start with the parallel port driving the breakout board and DG2S-16035's for a while, and decide later once the machine is operating under power. Kind of looks like a knowledge of C++ may be required. Perhaps this will change in the future...

I do have a problem that applies to many folks with older lathes, I believe.
The cross slide channel that contains the original acme screw is not large enough to allow a ball screw nut to pass. The alternative is to use a high precision acme screw and nut.

My idea was to lock the ball screw to the cross slide where the hand wheel used to be, mounted so that it cannot rotate and rotate a ball nut that is restrained with thrust washers and fastened to the saddle. This would force the cross slide back and forth as the nut is rotated.

While the ball screw would then protrude past the nut and travel as the cross slide was moved, this would allow a decent diameter ball screw. I do wonder if there is a problem with running the ball screw nut this way. I read somewhere that the nuts cannot be used upside down, which they would be part of the time.

[macona]

For the basic stuff you don't need to know C. If you want to start adding stuff like tool changers then you will need to learn C. C isn't that hard.

There are some pretty low profile ball screws around. You should be able to for a 1" diameter nut in there, right?

[ironmonger]

This is a 1929 South Bend 11" lathe... The cross slide nut is in a channel about 15/16" wide and the C/L of the leadscrew is about .375" above the bottom of the channel. I was afraid that anything that fit in there might not like the load.
I am going to take a trip over to my local Motion Industries distributor this afternoon and see what solutions they may have.

[macona]

There is surprisingly little load on the cross slide screw of a lathe. I wouldn't worry about it.

[MaxHeadRoom]

I recently converted a LatheMaster 9x30 and was fortunate to find a miniature ball screw the was virtually the size of the original Acme.
The fine pitch of 2.5mm takes care of the loading.
Max.