My lathe is rubbish. That's just a fact. Luckily the lathe is a rather clever mechanism and even a bad one can make decent parts due to fundamental precepts of geometry.
What I noticed today was that the saddle can twist. I think I have the rear gibb a bit tight for anywhere more than 5" from the chuck. The fact that there is a gibb is my own upgrade, the OE arrangement was some cast iron plates with screws that were not quite tight onto a painted surface (did I mention that my lathe is rubbish?) So, I started thinking, and it occurred to me that whilst the traditional lathe solution to the fact that the leadscrew is offset from the point of action of the tool is to have a saddle with long wings, you could have a short saddle that only controls in X with dual ballscrews to keep X perpendicular to Z. I _think_ that this makes some things easier, as you can have a short saddle which makes missing the head easier, and leaves more room for the screw covers. And, you can adjust the X-Y squareness, which is normally impossible. Apart from the extra cost, what is the drawback? This isn't the same as a central leadscrew, by the way, that's nice, but in that scenario too, the scew can't keep the saddle square. -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Slashdot TV. Videos for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=160591471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
