clocking in

I'm new to the forum .

Member of a local model engineering club .

FWIW I have a Colchester Bantam lathe and a Rong Fu ( like a Warco ) round column mill which I have fitted with a simple CNC, retaining the handwheels - so as to have either NC or manual control.

Hello John and welcome. I (and others on here) would like more details of your CNC conversion please.

Brian

Welcome to the forum

H

Hi John welcome to the forum. The CNC upgrade sounds interesting can you give us a picture or two and how do you disengage the motors when you use handwheels and vice a versa.

David

David, Everybody,

thank-you for the interest in the RF CNC project.

I've shamelessly copied a design from YouTube driving the axes leaving the handwheels in place. With the stepper drivers switched on - you can't move them by hand. Drivers off - you feel the steppers cogging over giving slight resistance to motion. The X&Y leadscrews are replaced with ballscrews which would rotate under axial load without that resistance. I'm told that the steppers probably generate backEMF which may not be good for drivers , i haven't had problems.

 photos  are probably self-explanatory 

The Z acts on the quill. The original quill rack-and-pinion mechanism gives more backlash than i'm happy with.

Controller is GRBL running on Arduino - works very reliably - I am impressed.

Arduino step-and-direction output goes to hefty drivers bought with the stepper motors from cnc4you - works fine - photo shows all the bits - subsequently moved to proper enclosure-

In use for 5 years for shape-simple and shape-complex machining.

hope that's helpful,

johns

Edited By John Scott 13 on 27/09/2021 12:39:06

Hello John, the best thing that you can do with photos is to create an album for each subject.

Albums can be found in thegreen and black banners at the top of this page. Don't quote me but I think that the green banner is for personal albums and the black one will show you ather members albums.

Brian

Hello John, your pictures are showing fine on the forum.

Brian