Lathe suggestions?

[routercnc]

Finally finished both DROs at last!

Z axis
Here is the spacer plate between the drop down bracket and the read head. This needs to be reasonably accurate in thickness to put the read head in about the right place on the scale:


Checking to see if it would work - also to see if the numbers went the right way (positive to the right). It wasn't obvious which way round the read head should go and there was no mention of anything in the instructions for the scales:



Bump-stop to bump-stop is a bit less than the quoted travel (450 mm) unless you angled the top slide round and included that as well(~70mm), otherwise all good.

I'll stop briefly here to point out that initially I was uncertain about fitting DROs given that it is likely to go CNC in the future. However I'm glad I did because the handwheel graduations on Z are not something logical like 10 lines of 0.1mm (giving 1mm per big number). No, they are 10 lines of 0.25mm, which means each big number is 2.5mm. I guess they are trying to get a metric-ish imperial system. The X axis cross-slide had a different number but was also not 0.1mm per line. Can safely ignore all that.

Back to the Z axis DRO. I added a 60mm x 60mm x 3mm aluminium angle bracket to run the energy chain in. This bolted to the holes used to fix an optional mill head attachment.





Note that I had to cut the energy chain open to lay the cables in as it was not the type with slots in. I couldn't feed the cable through as the connectors on the end were too big.

I think the angle bracket shelf will attract swarf etc. so thinking about a plastic curtain arrangement of some kind hanging off the top of the saddle. Not decided yet.

X axis
I wasn't happy with the original 100mm scale so swapped it for the 150mm model. This hangs out the back a bit so needed a bracket making:






Seemed to have made a Minion!



Here it is fitted:


The other end was just a simple round spacer tube.

Dialling it in:

In this shot you can also see I swapped out the cross slide locking bolt from a cap head to a hex head, otherwise I wouldn't be able to use it. May swap the gib bolts in the future too.

Last bit to do was fit the splash cover. After looking at lots of options I decided to go for a bracket off the back of the scale. Here roughing a pair out of a bit of box section:


Done:






I'll leave fitting the display readout until the lathe is set up on the bench - hope to do that this weekend.