New Sino DRO some lathe tooling and new laptop added to my shop

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deere_x475guy

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Hi gang, I ordered a Sino DRO from Matt at http://www.machinetoolonline.com/ on Wednesday around noon and it arrived Friday at 11:00 am. Pretty good shipping time and the package arrived in good shape. Over all I am really happy with it. The package included brackets, lots of cable ties, shims, screws ECT. I didn't have to use anything from my screw bin and no trips to the hardware store to get something I needed to finish mounting it. I pulled my Shooting Star off on Wednesday right after I place the ordered and had everything cleaned up and ready to mount the new one. I spent about 6 hours on Friday and 2 hours this morning before completing the install. I just finished setting up count directions and other parameters so I am ready to get back to building the the Webster.

Here are a few pics I took.

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I also picked up some lathe tooling from Production Tool today. I wanted a smaller boring bar with and indexable bit. This one will fit a hole that has a .430 dia starter hole. I had some brazed boring bars that I bought 5 years ago and have managed to trash all the small ones. Lets see how long it takes me to take this bit out..:)

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Computers and software are a pain in the butt...I am a Web Developer and every now and then I need to upgrade my software to keep up with the changing times....(don't we all?). Well this last upgrade pretty much put the stops to my 7 year old laptop. It is an HP with 512 meg of ram, slow AMD processor and was on it's 2nd hard drive and third cpu fan. So off I go laptop shopping to see what was out there. I was pretty shocked to see what you could get for under $800.00. The old HP cost me $1200.00 at Sam's club 7 years ago. The new one is an HP with 3 gig of ram, 160 meg HD, has a DVD burner with LightScribe (for those of you that may not know what this does it will use the laser to print a label on the Top of the DVD), with a 17" inch monitor all for under $800.00.

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Bob

Just a couple questions, did your Shooting Star quit working or didn't you like it?
I see you have the your DRO mounted to the left side of the carriage, is there a reason as most are mount on the right side of the carriage.

I don't have a DRO for my lathe yet and was trying to figure out what brand to get and how to mount it.

Hal
 
Hi Hal, the Shooting Star works just like it did new. It's an older model and forgets your setting when shut down or a power failure happens. It's resolution is .0005 and has a lesser accuracy than the others. I did some nice work with it but for the reasons above I chose to upgrade. The newer Shooting Star models have addressed the issues mentioned in my second sentence. The price for one of the new Shooting Stars was more than I paid for the Sino ($549 delivered). I saved the packaging so when I sell the Shooting Star I will have boxes to ship it in.

I had the original cross slide scale from the Shooting Star mounted on the right. My cross slide locking screw is also on the right as is my carriage lock. I made brackets to hold the Shooting Star scale 3/8ths of inch so that I could use a tool to still lock down the cross slide. This time I decided to try it out on the left. It may not work out and if need be I will have to figure something else out.
 
Hello Bob, just a quick question:
How come you did not purchase the Sino from CDCO, they seem to have the same DRO for under $500. I have been looking at them myself...
 
Kenny I got a 3 year guarantee with this unit from Matt and he spent a lot of time with me on the phone and didn't bad mouth other units. I am very please with the transacting and the unit (other than the manual sucks).

I just sold my Shooting Star to Ed Miles in Canada (from this board). He called me while I was typing this. He is quit a guy and we talked for almost an hour. He is 75 years old and still going strong and is in the process of building an engine using only loctite as a fastener. Very interesting guy to talk to indeed. He will post his project when the gets back from Brazil in April.
 
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