The half-nuts on my jet 9 inch lathe finally got so bad that I decided to replace the Acme lead screw with a ball screw. I bought the cheapest ebay kit with 12 mm screw, nut, nut block and two supports.
I really don't like to be required to fire up the computer and the control box and use the MDI or jogging just to turn a couple of thou off a screw or something else so simple. So I had to come up with a way to disengage the ball screw nut from the carriage when I want to use the lathe manually. I succeeded in contriving a "ball nut catcher" which lets me attach the ball nut to the apron by simply moving the carriage to the right where the nut slides into the "catcher" and moving a lever. When I finish with the cnc operation I just move the carriage to the right and release the lever. Now when I manually move the carriage to the left the nut stays parked at the right end of the machine. By the way, I have a similar arrangement on my 10EE. It seems that the current style is to strip all the manual operation off the machine so I don't expect a lot of demand to know how I did it but if anyone is in the process of converting a machine or would like to make add this feature to one you already have, let me know and I will try to post some pictures or movies somewhere. Cecil ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
