Search Results for 'Myford 7 CNC conversion'

[Tony JeffreeParticipant @tonyjeffree56510]

Posted by KWIL on 22/01/2012 11:47:51:

I look forward to Alan (cncyormyford) actually marketing his device await the price shock.

 

K

The price shock is actually pretty mild…

 

EMC2 is free, as is the Linux operating system that it runs under, and both will run happily in a clapped out PC that isn’t good enough to run Windows any more, as long as it has a parallel port – if not, they can be bought as add-on cards for a tenner.

 

You can build yourself a shaft encoder with (say) 60 slots at the periphery of an ally disk (one of the platters from an old hard drive is ideal) and a couple of optical sensors to give you a quadrature encoder. Plus a third sensor & slot to give the index pulse. Parts cost significantly less than a tenner.

 

Yes, you will need a couple of stepper motors and stepper drivers, a PSU, and probably a breakout board. Parts cost £200-300.

 

So all in, a fraction of the cost of a Myford screwcutting box and Metric conversion set, which as I have pointed out above, isn’t nearly as flexible.

 

Of course, all of the above means a fair amount of time & messing with soldering irons, but that is part of the fun.

 

Regards,

Tony

Edited By Tony Jeffree on 22/01/2012 13:07:24

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

One point I’d like to make and I don’t have a horse in this race as I have neither of the units described, neither is my daily drive CNC’d or anything like.

 

Some years ago, many in fact , I bought a brand new ML7 from Myford. being young and cash strapped I bought the basic model and drooled over the rest. I always lusted after [a] a screwcutting gearbox and [b ] Judy Williams from down our road.

 

Years later I managed to pick up a clapped out ML7 with hardy worn screwcutting gearbox for not much money. Judy Williams unfortunately always eluded me.

 

So with a big smile on my recent acquisition I transposed the box onto my lathe. As I was also doing some very odd part I also needed the metric conversion. At this time the only ones available were genuine Myford. The Indian cow dung pattern clones had not arrived here at this time. So much lighter in the wallet I was setup.

Oh the joy, a quick flick of some levers and all was set. A quick flick of reversing a gear and fine feed was available.

 

Then came the need to do a metric thread.

 

What used to be a 5 minute job of swapping some gears on the old ML7 now became15 minutes changing ALL the gears and the banjo, plus I had now lost the fine feed until it was all put back.

 

To be honest it turned out to be a total disappointment [ on a par with Judy Williams ] that I never really got over.

 

If you do lots of different threads and a jobbing shop really shows this up [ Must check if the all metric small TOS can cut 11 1/2 tpi for some unions next week ? ] then one of these units would be ideal.

 

Even me with a good grasp of CNC prefer a hand held unit that having to go full CNC.

I have a division master and to be honest this is in virtually weekly use and I’d be dead in the water without it.

I have seriously looked at the Putnam unit but held off as I knew Tony had one. Fitting one to the small TOS even with the one pulse per rev I feel I’d not have the problems Tony had given the large 3HP motor and geared head.

 

At the moment I keep a CVA lathe for imperial threads and the TOS for metric. The CVA is down at the moment having new spindle bearings but perhaps a Putnam would allow me to dispose of the CVA and do all the threading on the TOS.

 

This is just my personal take on it.

[blowlampParticipant @blowlamp]

Posted by John Haine on 14/01/2012 10:16:44:
And the thing that struck me when I did my S7 CNC conversion was how much extraneous mechanism there is in that, very excellent, machine that could be eliminated by judicious use of electronics. Simple headstock drive by brushless DC motor; no changewheels or gearbox for screwcutting or fine feed; all threads available; metric and imperial on all feeds; PXF as standard; the list goes on and on. If anyone did think of resurrecting the Myford range (RDG?) I hope they would seriously consider some investment not just in modern manufacturing but also in updating the design.

 

 

Unfortunately they can only resurrect the Myford lathe in name only now the original workforce and factory have gone.

 

To me, anything else is just a copy and is a real loss for manufacturing in England.

 

 

 

Martin.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

And the thing that struck me when I did my S7 CNC conversion was how much extraneous mechanism there is in that, very excellent, machine that could be eliminated by judicious use of electronics. Simple headstock drive by brushless DC motor; no changewheels or gearbox for screwcutting or fine feed; all threads available; metric and imperial on all feeds; PXF as standard; the list goes on and on. If anyone did think of resurrecting the Myford range (RDG?) I hope they would seriously consider some investment not just in modern manufacturing but also in updating the design.

[David SeniorParticipant @davidsenior29320]

It may be a bit late to add to this thread, but I motorised the knee of my Myford VMF mill (article published in MEW issue 137). I had problems with the weight of the knee assembly, and the conversion had it’s limitations. To solve this, I added gas springs, which was very successful. I submitted 2 follow up articles to the editor but unfortunately they have never been published.

I was very pleased with the overall conversion, and it allowed me to dabble with some ideas for products to fit to my classic mini. Things moved on from there when I decided to try and sell those products, such that my company bought a ‘proper’ cnc mill. Now the VMF gets little or no use, and seems incredibly slow compared to the scary speed of a modern machine!

Let me know if any more details would be useful.

Dave

[Tony JeffreeParticipant @tonyjeffree56510]

Posted by John Coates on 31/05/2011 21:07:21:

Well I can sympathise with Ian

 

As a recent comer to lathes and mills to accomplish some home engineering, in the second year of a subscription to MEW, the vitriol in this post has convinced me that I will not be taking out a third year (obviously to Tony’s delight).

 

I have come across many factions in my time in many forums, mainly motorcycle and computer OS related, and I guess I should not be surprised to find one here. Up until now my questions have been answered with the utmost help and fullness and I believed this forum to be somewhere I could enjoy for many years to come.

 

But I do not have CNC, CAM etc due to being in my mid-40’s and raising a young family (2 and 6). It was a stretch to my budget to acquire both a second hand lathe and mill and all the accompanying tooling and accessories (still not complete as I learn more about what I should have and I never realised that it would cost more than the machines!). My first task is to acquire the manual skills to achieve what I want. And I find immense pleasure in turning those handwheels back and forth, watching the swarf, wondering whether the outcome will be fit for purpose or end up in the scrap box.

 

I will continue to learn what I need to do to with the help of some on here and I am sure another web forum will be found where the membership is more welcoming to those who do not own the most expensive equipment.

 

I am lucky that having found MEW I began to collect the back issues and there are loads of articles relevant to me and my skill level and the little job that I want to do. In fact they are replicated in a lot of the Workshop Practice Series which I have found worth collecting as well. And I must admit there were more articles per issue then together with lots of useful little helpful hints in the side bars, kind of like the asides a good teacher or lecturer passes on to their pupils.

 

Thankyou for the helpful replies I have received to date and I will restrict my activity to the Beginners section and keep from straying into these elitist areas where I do not feel welcome and I believe are very off putting to newbies.

 

I am sure points have been scored but as I do not know the rules I do not care a jot for the outcome. It has come across as very bitter and unwelcoming.

 

On the contrary, John, I take absolutely no delight in *anyone at all* deciding to unsubscribe from the magazine, so please do me the courtesy of not putting words into my mouth.

 

I came to engineering as a newbie, like yourself, with no former knowledge of metalworking to spak of; my present state of knowledge and skill, such as it is, is the result of lots of reading – books, magazines such as MEW, on-line forums – lots of trial-and-error, and lots of help freely given by people that know more about the subject than I do. Over the years I have written a good many articles for MEW; my primary and overriding motivation in writing for the magazine is to give something back, in appreciation of the help and support I have been given in the past and that I continue to receive. Inevitably, what I write about is what I do in my workshop; increasingly, that includes a fair amount of CNC-related “stuff”, and will continue to do so. I have found CNC invaluable in my workshop activities (and almost exclusively for one-off pieces, not for repetition work, by the way; the idea that CNC is only useful for repetition work is often trotted out, but it is simply not true) and I know, frothe feedback that I have received, that what I write about CNChas been of help to others that want to go a similar path. I am not arrogant enough to believe that all model engineers should be using CNC; whether they do or not is a personal choice. However, for it to BE a personal choice, it has to be available and accessible to them; hence, while I believe that the one issue of MEW in question was wrong in its balance of CNC vs other stuff, I do not want to see the Editor browbeaten into removing CNC (or other relevant new technology for that matter) from the pages of the magazine just because of the personal prejudice of a small number of voiciferous but blinkered individuals.

 

Contrary to some comments that have been made in this thread, CNC is increasingly accessible to even the most modest buget; as John S has pointed out, building a small CNC router can be achived for as little as £100 if you are prepared to apply some skill and imagination, and once built, you have a tool that you can use to machine components for something better. A while back, I converted my Myford ML-7 to CNC (and wrote up the conversion for MEW); my lathe had formerly been fitted with a Myford quick change gearbox, and following the conversion, I sold off the gearbox and various other bits (the banjos and gears and the topslide) that were now surplus to requirements, and ended up with a CNC lathe plus a decent amount of surplus ££ in my pocket for other things. The point? Many of our readership would consider it perfectly reasonable to lay out the £400 or so that a QC gearbox would cost on the used market, or the £ lots more that Myford would charge for a new one, but somehow, laying out the ~£300 it cost me to do a CNC conversion is out of reach of their pockets. That makes no sense to me at all.

 …continued in next post…

Edited By Tony Jeffree on 01/06/2011 11:08:44

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

Long post so go get a coffee.

 

I feel that this has all been taken out of context. Looking at a generic issue of MEW there are 10 project subjects per issue and this isn’t counting editors page, scribe a line etc.

 

So from issues 164 to 170 that’s 80 projects without a mention of CNC and after that we have 1 or 2 out of the 10 until we reach 177 which by a fluke had 3 but still wasn’t 33%

 

Now amongst the previous 1,770 projects [ approx ] since the mag started and that’s very conservative as the early issues had something like 15 articles in them per issue there have been umpteen articles on toolposts, lathe stops, tool and cutter grinders but no one has bitched over these.

 

David has mentioned that the American Digital Machinist magazine has a quarterly print run of 15,000 so there must be a demand out there for this subject matter. We don’t have a specialist magazine for this but and it’s a big BUT, the magazine is called MODEL ENGINEERS WORKSHOP and like it or not these machines are now in, wait for it, model engineers workshops.

 

Now to put my other hat on. When the Sieg range of machines were being thought about we, as in Ketan at ARC and myself were doing CNC conversion kits for the X3. We were asked by Sieg to help out with a turnkey machine which we were initially loath to do as that took away the kit project. However reflecting on this if we didn’t someone else would, so the first KX1 was built here and shipped to China.

 

When these were ready at the new factory setup just to do the CNC machines we went over to shake them out and sort out support etc.

Support was to be in the form of a web based forum with links to the various agents around the world. ARC became the sole UK and European agent with some sub agents in Europe. other countries like America had their agents and certain countries that were lacking agents were dealt with direct from the factory.

 

For every machine sold details were passed to me for support purposes, the exceptions being internal sales in China and Russia which has bought a large number for training schools. I do not get the Russian numbers but can guess from the blocks of serial numbers missing.

 

There are now in excess of 3,000 KX machines out there since they were introduced and this doesn’t cover copies like Syil, How Mou, and Novacon so just what the total is no one knows.

 

This also doesn’t cover any home built or converted machines or the literally 1,000’s of routers which all work on the same principle.

 

Add to this the 15,000 readership of the only magazine for these people and you will see they are a force that will not go away whether you like it or not.

 

Now if Myford for instance were able to sell this many instead of their rumoured 18 per year perhaps they could call the shots ?

 

John S.

Edited By John Stevenson on 30/05/2011 23:31:36

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

I think more work needs to go into the quality and layout of the ones they already have on the net first.

Take your article Tony on the Myford CNC conversion starting in issue 138.

It starts off P27, P28 then we get the contents page smack bang in the middle when it should be at the front.

That’s just one issue, there are others as well.

John S.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

Even a “native metric” S7 (I bought a new one a few years ago, with the large bore mandrel) only has a 1/8″ pitch leadscrew, so you do still need metric conversion gears if

you are doing long screws.  However for most applications the approximate metric gearing that Myford give in the handbook is quite good enough at least for fixings.

 

Fitting DROs has been covered in at least one MEW article – problem solved I would think?

 

Or do a CNC conversion and let the PC take care of it….

 

What’s gone wrong with the web formatting on this site?

CNC conversion of the Myford Super 7

[GLENN BUNTParticipant @glennbunt80076]

Hi,
I am looking into Tony Jefree`s CNC conversion of the Myford ML7 Lathe (MEW May 2008). Tony recommends fitting your Myford ML7 Cross Slide Bearings Set (Part no MYFML7CSBS) to the ML7. My conversion will be on a Myford Super 7 and I see that the kit it doesn’t fit the Super 7. Why is this? Is the cross slide lead screw diameter larger? Does anybody know of an alternative kit / bearings I could use?

Many Thanks

Edited By David Clark 1 on 20/03/2010 08:48:16