Adding a leadscrew to a lathe ?

Any one retro fitted a leadscrew to a small lathe? ( 15-20" between centres )

There are now motor controlled set ups withh off the shelf ballscrews that require no gear train so that would cut out a lot of the work.

Is this a practical project or a rabbit hole ?

In principle pretty practical but, as you will only do it once, bound to be 5 times the work and general futzing about than you expected.

Lots of careful measuring beforehand will be essential. This is the sort of job that really makes you wish for decent 3D CAD skills.

Clive

Posted by Rich2502 09/05/2022 14:15:41

Any one retro fitted a leadscrew to a small lathe? ( 15-20" between centres )

There are now motor controlled set ups withh off the shelf ballscrews that require
no gear train so that would cut out a lot of the work.

Is this a practical project or a rabbit hole ?

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Warco cnc conversion Mew 207 through to 212,
a bit bigger than your machine but the principle much the same.
John

Are you starting off with a lathe with no leadscrew? Often people with electronic leadscrews just add a stepper drive to an existing leadscrew. This allows the half nuts to be engaged and disengaged as required. Adding a ballscrew and nut would require a different way of working as there are no half nuts that work with ballscrews. You may have to come up with a way to disengage the carriage drive and move the ball nut away from the carriage if you wanted to do something that required moving the carriage manually. Back driving the ballscrew may not work.

A permanently fitted ballscrew drive is halfway to having a CNC lathe, is this your aim?

Martin C

If it is a small watchmakers type lathe with a clamp on saddle and no existing leadscrew then the saddle will probably not be designed to slide up and down the bed like on a larger lathe so you may get problems with twist and racking of the carriage.

Look at deansphotgrafia site this shows Taig leadscrew fitting.

There is an example of a leadscrew setup I fitted to a Taig here.

Taig Lathe V3 | Model Engineer (model-engineer.co.uk)

Have a look at Ades workshop on Youtube . He is doing one now. Along with a lot of other upgrades.

Steve.