Toolpost CNC Attachment

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

This video was posted on HMEM earlier, don’t think I have seen mention of it before but sorry if you have seen it.

Interesting attachment that quickly fits to the toolpost and top slide to convert your manual lathe to CNC. Good description and details of how he made it.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

No, I hadn’t seen it either, but interesting and entertaining.

Thanks.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

Good ingenious idea for a larger lathe.  I assume that the topslide feed screw has been replaced with a ballscrew?  I wonder how that works in manual mode, is there any tendency for the slide to slip?  Overall seems more work than just converting the whole lathe to CNC though.

 

[jaCK HobsonParticipant @jackhobson50760]

I not convinced. Seems an over-engineered solution for opening beer bottles. Mind you, I think all bottle openers are over engineered.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

He said it was still the standard screw at the moment so some backlash to compensate for.

I think the idea was to still have the large machine so it was easy to use manually and then be able to quickly add the CNC attachment for when there is a job that needs it. So maybe 90% of the time running manually 10% let Mach compensate for backlash.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

I have not found Mach to be very good at correcting the levels of backlash likely on a lathe.  On my mill with ballscrews with about o.01mm it works ok.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

I think if you placed a single slide at 45 degrees to the Z axis and tied the control in with the Z axis DRO you could replicate the old hydraulic copying attachment, but you’d need to do something clever with the code.

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