Centroid Acorn Orac ATC conversion

[Neale]

I did the same re belt drive pulleys on my Orac - 1 to 1 from the spindle with the encoder on a 3D-printer adjustable bracket for belt change/tensioning. Threading works fine. Encoder is 100PPR, as recommended by PlanetCNC.

I kept the original steppers but given that the previous owner had stripped out almost all the electronics but had not quite started on the replacement, I put a 68V PSU in there with appropriate drivers. Seems to work OK.

I was hoping to use a UC300 and UCCNC to match my CNC mill and router user interfaces, but due to the fact that CNCdrive had been promising the lathe version for a few years but not delivering, I ended up with PlanetCNC. Haven't had any problems with that - seems to do what it says on the box. CNCdrive released the lathe module a month later...

No ATC on mine either, but it came with a Multifix QCTP and a few toolholders. Not quite enough toolholders, of course, but there never is! New ones are not cheap, so considering whether to swap to a different but more economic QCTP. I have managed to set up the tool table for the few tools I have used but still need to improve the tool tip measuring process. Semi-automatic tool changing isn't too much of a sweat for my kinds of jobs although wouldn't want to do commercial production work that way.

Been using the CNC mill a lot recently but will be back to the lathe shortly, I hope. I have been given some good ideas on tool table setup so need to find time to work on that.