Home-made CNC lathe using servos

Holy Macaroni! This is fantastic. What is your background? Are you or did you work in the CNC industry. Please post a recent link to purchase these trinkets. Thanks for sharing!
 
Holy Macaroni! This is fantastic. What is your background? Are you or did you work in the CNC industry. Please post a recent link to purchase these trinkets. Thanks for sharing!
Hi, I thought I replied to this post, but my reply is lost.
I'm an engineer in a different industry, in microelectronics. Metalworking is my hobby started in 2007. This lathe is my very first CNC machine.
I'm not making a lot of these trinkets because of other projects. But I'm currently making a batch of 2-inch "dodecahedron in a ball" items now. Will post a video in a couple of days.
 
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This is a thread about CNC Lathe I recently built. This is my first CNC machine, and obviously, I’m not a CNC guru. Being an engineer, I prefer more practical ways of making things rather than R&D approach with investing plenty of time, money and energy. This is also why I use simple and robust ideas instead of diving deep into unique ones and solving the problems just created.


I started with Atlas lathe bed I bought on ebay. This bed has pretty wide (1-1/2”) flat ways, so one can easily put the linear bearing rails on it.
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I use THK HRW-21 slides. The rail is 37mm wide, so it uses the whole width of the bed ways. The slide block is 21mm tall (with a rail) – this is a low-profile series. I think it’s important to use low-profile one here because the overall heights of the “sandwich” limits the maximum swing over carriage. The same HRW-21 slides are used for X coordinate as well.

I put ~1/2” aluminum plate in between of Z and X rails. I milled the surfaces and made the threaded holes to mount the slides on the plate. The X-screw supports are also mounted on the plate. The milling was done on my manual EMCO machine.

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There are some essential parts I bought in LMS online store. These are: the headstock casting, the spindle with 4” flange, and the milling table.

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I didn’t buy the headstock assembly because it goes with 3” spindle, ball bearings and other stuff I didn’t need (gears, etc.). I installed roller bearings. The riser blocks were made to rise the headstock by 1-1/2”.

1605 ballscrews were installed on both coordinates. The bed has about 42mm spacing between the ways. So 40mm wide ballnut fits perfectly.

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To be continued with Drives and Tooling.
Excellent beginning. I am looking forward to seeing the rest.
 
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