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    Newbie needs advice about a lathe

    I tried a DC treadmill motor on my 12x lathe with a gecko 320 servo and encoder. And a 180 V DC motor driven at 48 V. This was a bad idea. It sparked, smelled, overheated, while working. The original motor is industrial 1.5 kW continous AC 220V single phase. With belt drive and backgear. I now...
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    ShopShoe's Mini-Lathe Upgrades

    Lathes have always been the king of machine tools. Any lathe can be made better -- and any lathe is less than perfect. The more or less best small lathes in the world were the original Schaublins from switzerland. About 9x in size, with a 200 kg cast iron bed/cabinet. They cost about 60.000 €...
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    Sieg C3 Headstock Alignment?

    To OP ... 0.05 mm over 5 inches seems like quite a lot. Typical is 0.01 mm - 0.02 mm, from what I have seen past 20 years. It´s quite possible to sand the steel V fitting surfaces to whatever angle you need. You need a proper flat of some kind. Buying a few pieces of precision flat ground steel...
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    Newbie From Florida!

    You need some way to make the engine cylinders straight and true. Anything and everything else can be bolted on or glued with special industrial goops. It might be possible to use industrial brass bushings, in a cylinder block drilled with a drill press, and mount the bushings with industrial...
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    What have you been doing today?

    +1 Wood moves a lot. I am installing a wood premium sauna at the moment, as a sample, for future clients. The floor moves about 10 mm in size according to the seasons / temp, so small expansion spaces are left at the edges. Likewise, door mounts account for 2-5 cm contraction over time. Window...
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    Total new-comer to CAD. Which programme to choose.

    In europe the windozw thing is automated. No persons. Just press private user, follow silly prompts. The rtos systems of mine, lots of, are usually related to mach3 cnc sw. The windows mach3 is simply the interface, and the actual hw runs on ring 0 interupts and mostly on proprietary hw...
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    Drilling Very Small Holes

    Endless excellent posts on this thread. My customers (engraving) used to make, yes make, end mills as small as 0.04 mm when I worked as the sales manager for Haas Spain. And drill holes in the 0.1 mm and smaller sizes (another customer, making watches). It´s just really hard to do well. Like...
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    Total new-comer to CAD. Which programme to choose.

    Pretty much agree ... but calling the ms windoz authorization nr on the screen gets you auto-prompt and gives you a new code in 3 mins. I need windoz for rhino and office and mach3 cnc. maybe cam sw. It´s incredibly easy and efficient to use excel as a front end for real databases (postgres...
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    Total new-comer to CAD. Which programme to choose.

    1. Anyone can run a windows shell in a VM environment on linux. 2. The best easiest fastest 3D CAD sw I know of is Rhino 3D. A student license is cheapish. Easy to get. Enroll anywhere. No cloud crap. And really, really, really easy and good 3D CAD. Based on 35+ years of experience on 3D CAD...
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    Electric car plant

    Furthermore, re EV, in distress I could charge any EV at 25 kW in any of a hundred points near me in Barcelona, paying maybe 40€ for it at most. IF the 20 or so municipal free charging points and the carrefour free charging points were full. So any EV owner does not really *need* their own fast...
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    Electric car plant

    Electric car efficiencies are about 6x gas car efficiencies. A tesla 100 kWh battery car, large, premium, is about 2100 kg with 600 km range. Our volvo v60 allroad (4-wheel) is about 2100 kg with 900 km range. The tesla can get charged for free at hundreds of supermarkets around spain (they...
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    Downsizing to a smaller lathe

    Fwiw.. I changed my original motor to an ac servo drive (2.5kW continuous) with 1:3 HTD 8/30 belt drive. There is about 30x more torque at all speeds, including 1 rpm or less, and the benefit is immense, incredible, outstanding. I never ever thought that the torque would matter, but it really...
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    Considering a 3 phase CNC small lathe - - - have 240V single phase

    3 phase is inherently cheap in motors and wiring and infrastructure. So most/all new(ish)buildings in spain/eu deliver 3 phase to the panel and or to the user. 200 amps service is unheard of. 200 x 240 x 1.4 == 56 kW capacity. - 380 V is about double == 112 kW. Big industrial workshops with 2-5...
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    How can I find a good home for my father's steam engine

    It might fetch 200-800 €, sometimes a bit more depending. Any end user buyer probably wants if for the actual historical presence .. it´s not a mechanical tool. Higher prices may exist, but these are from people alive able to defend their designs and the safety and engineering behind the stuff...
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    Build my own milling machine

    I´m possibly the worlds leading expert on "building a milling machine" ... having spent around 18000 hours and about 16 years at it, mostly near full time. My current gear is worth about 100.000 € as insurance replacement value, and for about the 12th time "I´m real close now..". Grin. The...
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    Lathe Alignment

    Everything depends on everything. If one has a test bar with taper, or a near perfect steel cylinder, all sorts of verifications become easy. MT builders and support engineers spend little time on checking the mechanicals, because they have the tools to do so efficiently.
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    Leaded steel

    I have welded lots of 12l14 parts .. and it is technically semi-weldable -- aka can be done but won´t be good, pretty or structurally 100% sound (in theory). Heavy heat works better. My parts are massive, like 30x100 mm sections 2 m long. 7018 rod is better than 6011. Thicker rod is better...
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    from scratch cnc ?s

    A pc for running the machine is trivial with a motion control card like csmio for mach3/4 or mesa for linuxcnc. Any pc will work fine. Making real, detailed, large, assemblies in any cad is another matter. The models are huge, and you really need a proper graphics card. A second hand nvidia is...
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    Lathe Brake

    I have a different but related observation . fwiw .. if its worth anything. I got my ac servo spindle drive to run about 10 months ago. Via timing belts - very good, rigid, wide, powerful timing belts at 1:3 transmission. The mounts are 30 mm thick tool steel members, and about 30-40 kg in...
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    Another Cam Grinder

    Absolutely ! You are using geometric scaling. All machines, more or less, use the same ideas, to get better precision, resolution, repeatability and accuracy. The same, even better, is common and used on modern cnc machines. The support guide blocks are relatively far away from each other. Say...
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