Taig 4029 CNC Ready Lathe

[rtp_burnsville]

Hi,

Does anyone here have experience with the Taig 4029 CNC ready lathe (ball-screw, 5C chuck)? Have been thinking about purchasing one but have not found any actual review of the lathe.

Thanks,
Robert

 

[kuhncw]

Robert,

You might ask the Taig Lathe And Mill Owners Club on Facebook. It is an active group and some of the members have the 5C Taig.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Taig.Lathe.And.Mill.Group/
You've probably done this, but you might check with Nick or Birt. They are dealers, but quite helpful.

Nick at Carter Tools
http://www.cartertools.com/
Birt at Soigeneris - your resource for hi-tech hobbies. Contact Us

Regards,

Chuck

 

[MillersvilleProf]

Hi,

Does anyone here have experience with the Taig 4029 CNC ready lathe (ball-screw, 5C chuck)? Have been thinking about purchasing one but have not found any actual review of the lathe.

Thanks,
Robert

I purchased one for my University lab last year. It is a nice little lathe, so far we have done only basic profile cuts on it, but I do plan on setting it up with gang tooling in the near future. I have been programming it in Fusion. My only real complaint so far is the spindle speed which only goes up to 1800, I would like a bit more speed for some of the stuff we do.

We also have three of the Taig mills with the 1/2" ball screws and 4th axis, they are really nice machines. It is nice having these machines to start students on before moving them up to our larger Haas machines.

 

[rtp_burnsville]

MillersvilleProf,

Thanks for your comments on the Taig lathe. Have you done any threading on the lathe setup you have?

BTW: I believe you wrote a nice review on the Taig mills several months here on the forum. Currently have a Tormach 1100 but those small Taig mill's would be a nice to-have as well. The higher spindle speed would work much better for PCB engraving and other such projects with the small bits.

Thanks again,
Robert

 

[stanstocker]

Sorry to interject, I've been contemplating one of the Taig cnc lathes for a while now. The gang tooling would certainly be nice in comparison to my cobbled together "modernized" compact 5 cnc.

The Taig CNC lathe looks very nice for the price. The spindle however has a single pulse per revolution rather than an encoder, at least as delivered. If the spindle speed varies during threading malformed threads may occur. This is NOT unique to the Taig, it is true for all lathes with single pulse per revolution spindles. The work around is simple, just take more passes with less depth of cut. Really paying attention to sharp well aligned tooling is a must. I'm inclined to regard this as a minor limitation in keeping with a small benchtop machine, but a rude surprise for some folks the first time they bump into it. Folks using Mach3 via a parallel port were used to this as that software/hardware combo couldn't typically process pulse streams quickly enough to support more advanced spindle encoders.

Cheers,
Stan

 

[MillersvilleProf]

I have not had a chance to try it for threading yet. As we have more sophisticated CNC lathes this was not a major concern, but we did buy their more expensive model with the digital index signal processor so it should be capable of doing it, how fast is of course the question. I am impressed by there machines. I did write a review of the mill awhile back, I will do the same with the lathe when I get more time to play with it. We just bought two more mills each with the 4th axis and I am looking forward to setting those up soon.

 

[rtp_burnsville]

Thanks..... Will watch for your review of the lathe in the future.

Robert