I bought a new Sherline 4000A CNC ready kit. http://www.sherline.com/4000pg.htm
http://www.sherline.com/packages.htm It's a tiny lathe, aka a "toy lathe", but I'm very pleased with the precision and the overall quality. I wouldn't consider it for running production for eight hours a day, and it's obviously not suitable for turning large parts, but I think it'll be very good for the work it was designed to do. I don't need to remove a lot of material so the fractional horsepower motor is up to the task. If I keep it clean and well lubed and don't abuse it by taking overly aggressive cuts, I expect it to last a long time. I'm close enough to the end of the purchasing phase of the tiny CNC lathe project that I can make fairly accurate cost assessments. It always surprises me when I add all of the costs. I'll probably have about US$1500 in this tiny little CNC project, but this is essentially a paying hobby for me, as I'll be selling the parts I make like a filthy capitalist (ha!) and I can therefore justify spending some money to make some money. Like you, I also considered the educational potential of a tiny lathe like this. I'm optimizing this CNC project for my short run production needs, but it'll still be small and light enough that I could put it in my pickup truck and take it to a Maker Fest or the local STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) education center that's run by some friends of mine (NewtonsAttic.com). It'd be fun to teach CNC fundamentals to young people in a hands on environment. It'd be very easy to design this little project to travel in two easy to carry parts, with an electronics panel that plugs into a wall outlet and has an electrical connector for the stepper motor wiring, and a machine base that can be clamped to a bench or table or screwed to the top of the electrical panel. You have a nice Unimat CNC lathe project! It looks like you and I are on parallel trajectories, with our tiny CNC lathes sooner, and our larger CNC lathe conversions later. From your Unimat CNC lathe blog post: /"Right hand threads?? It means that you turn the handles the wrong way, compared to modern (ie, anything newer than 60 years old!) lathes.//"/ Yeah, but that's just a matter of flipping one bit in the LinuxCNC configuration. :-) On 05/21/2013 11:15 AM, John Stewart wrote: > > My Unimat CNC lathe project is also coming along quite well. > > I have a D525MW in case + 5I25 because I have a larger lathe to do, > but this little Unimat will be completed first, and will use the > D525MW + 5+25 + Gecko G540, at least for now. Hopefully it'll be > making chips this week. > > I'm writing it up on http://cnc-for-model-engineers.blogspot.com > > What lathe are using for your mini-lathe project? > > I'll admit that the Unimat is basically a toy, but will allow others > to see how a cnc lathe operates, by taking it to shows, exhibitions, etc. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
