Acme Thread Issues

[Bob Korves]

Make sure you are feeding your work correctly so the cutter pushes away from the backlash, keeping the cutter constantly loaded in the direction of travel. If you are careful to always do that, worn screws are much less of a problem. If the cutter is trying to push the work into the slack you will always have problems. Lots of good work has been done on worn out machines...

 

[Wreck™Wreck]

What would you use instead?

Ballscrews, not saying that an Acme thread would not work, yet this is the year 2016 and technology moves on.

I work in a shop that celebrated their 50th birthday last year, we have several CNC lathes and mills and a butt load of old manual machines including a Warner & Swasey #5 turret lathe from 1952 which is 20 ft. long including the bar feeder, this lathe will drill a 4" hole 4" through 304 stainless solids in minutes if one can keep the work in the chuck, also a radial drill press that is large and old enough to scare the pants off of most people.

I will never discourage a person from a goal, merely point to the advantages of modern technology.

 

[John Hasler]

Ballscrews, not saying that an Acme thread would not work, yet this is the year 2016 and technology moves on.

Very expensive. I'd consider converting it back to hydraulics. In fact, it just occured to me to consider converting the knee on my mill to hydraulics.