Convert Wood Lathe from hand held tooling

[steve123]

I get what you mean ...and that is a possibility. I was looking at the bowl problem from the the direction of mounting the blank and machining in one go, if I mounted the blank then proceeded to mill the outside first then rechucked it as I would under normal circumstances, then milled the inside to finish, problem solved. I still may be better off mounting the router on a rotary table on the cross slide ... I am assuming that I would continue to keep the blank turning in the standard direction to get the cutter into a 'reversed' or concave bowl lip. I had fallen into my normal trap of overcomplicating things...

Hi,
Yes think you might need the rotary table if using a normal router,something like this may work without because of the small body http://www.mycncuk.com/forums/showth...ight=brushless ,but it does mean your in for a lot of work with the total conversion,the good thing about using a router/spindle is the speed will do all the work,so you could drive your lathe chuck very slow,maybe with a stepper motor,the motor would run continually for turning work and then index round for your fluting,barley twists or any holes you need round the circumference.

Steve.

[John S]

Sorry to piss on your chips but from the looks of that machine, nice as it is, it's not a real candidate for a CNC conversion.

You would probably be a lot better off selling it or using it as a second op machine and starting with a clean sheet of paper.
What you want to do has been done before in various stages, simple linear rails for the bed and cross slide and a double drive system for the head as Steve says, motor to spin at speed for turning and stepped geared drive for barley twists etc.

.

[steve123]

Well hope you get it sorted mate,so you can get back to making a living.

Steve.