Member postings for Kifayat Hussain

Hi Les,

I recently moved to Adelaide about an year and a half ago and had my tools and machines in storage in Malaysia.

During this period, I was constantly looking for local options on buying tools and machinery to get back into the hobby. I must mention that prices here are not as competitive as in the UK for good lathes and mills.

Have a look at Gumtree as some may have advised.

I eventually decided to ship my SC2 lathe, SX2P mill, bandsaw and other tools to Adelaide. I used a company called Seven Seas and booked their large MoveCube. I did a thorough hand clean of my machine tools and oiled them for the 2 months long sea journey. I had crates made for the heavy stuff out of plywood and other light tools wrapped in packing paper in cardboard shipping boxes.

I did not have anything pressure cleaned or fumigated. As long as there is no dirt/soil attached to the tools such as garden tools, or any infected wood or articles made of tree bark etc, you should not be worried.

Many people interpret Australian regulations as being zero tolerant but its not as harsh if you follow the basic guidelines.

Ensure you have a proper packing list and declare everything in as much detail as possible. This will help make the customs and quarantine process a breeze.

My stuff arrived last month and went through customs and quarantine inspection at Melbourne before it arrived in Adelaide without any issues.

Any items that you have owned for a period of more than 12 months are tax exempted if you are a returning Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident. This also applies if this is your first time arriving in Australia as a new Permanent Resident.

Some things to consider are replacing the UK to Australia sockets which can be done after arrival to meet local safety standards. I will eventually do the same as all my tools have UK sockets. Also consider the fact that most homes will not have 3 phase power to run big machinery such as a Bridgeport unless you bring along a phase converter.

Best of luck with your relocation to Brisbane.

Edited By Kifayat Hussain on 11/04/2019 15:41:47

Hi Michael,

I have added the photos to my album but I am unable to edit the post.

Here are the photos of the mentioned items:

Magentic DRO Reader Head (Model MR500A)

Ditron D50_3V DRO Display Unit

DB 9 Pin No weld connectors

First time posting here but have been silently following the forum for years.

Its 2019 now and several cheaper options exist for DROs. You just need to shop around. Ebay, AliExpress, etc.

Magnetic DRO packages are a lot cheaper now than they used to be a few years ago. (I am not talking about digital linear scales here but the actual magnetic scales here).

I always wanted a DRO set for my SX2P and SC2 but the size of the cheap digital scales or glass scales always put me off. But magnetic scales have a much smaller sized head and are easier to mount in tight spaces and offer almost negligible loss of travel or interference with machining activity.

LittleMachineShop has guided instructions somewhere on their website describing the optimal way of mounting it a Sieg Magnetic DRO scale to a mini lathe or a mini mill.

One of my local Sieg re-sellers had the Sieg magnetic reader heads on sale for a attractive price and I quickly bought 2 along with magnetic scales. They are out of stock now else I would have bought a few more for the SX2P Z axis and the SC2.

The magnetic reader heads had information for the various coloured wires as follows:

Yellow=A, Brown=B, Grey=Z, Red= 5VDC and White=0V

After some searching on the web I realized most of these scales have the same generic dimensions, 5 micron resolution and supported 5V TTL/RS422 signal connections.

You can find the same generic magnetic read heads sold under various brand names all over Ebay/Aliexpress.

Once I had the magnetic reader heads and scales, I started shopping around for the DRO display unit or the bluetooth tablet based DRO display option.

I found a Ditron D50_3V dro unit for a reasonable price on Aliexpress. It supported reading the same 5V TTL/RS422 signal but required DB9 pin serial connectors.

I then bought a pair of no weld DB9 connectors to wire the magnetic read heads with the DRO display unit.

The wiring sequence I used is: Yellow=A= Pin 6, Brown=B= Pin 8, Grey=Z= Pin 9, Red=5VDC= Pin 7 and White=0V= Pin 2.

After some quick setup of the DRO display following the instruction manual, the setup worked.

Overall the above mix and match setup was a bit of a risk but only costed me around A$ 350.

I have not mounted the DROs on my SX2P yet but I am happy with the quick tests.