Boring with Sherline lathe

You need a mill. You are going to find that it isn't an optional thing if you plan to stay in this hobby. Sorry but the rabbit hole has already started to work on you and there is no hope! ;)
 
I have a mill (Sherline 5000) that my Dad gave to me a few years back.

If I plug it in, that's just giving the mouse a cookie. Undoubtedly I'll then need to equip it with a DRO and a rotary table.
 
You can hold off on both for now. Buy a rotary table if and when you need it. A DRO is nice but I've done without one for 40 years. Your mill will serve you well once you learn to use it.

But yes, there are some cookies to obtain.
 
For what little it's worth I've been boring 8º tapers in 4140, for both 11 and 16 ER collets with a 5/16 HSS tool ground down to fit the hole. The 16 Collets are over .8 deep. I guess that isn't four times the diameter of the tool, though. It is sticking out 1.5 inches though. The collets fit with no shake at all.
 
Sherline's DRO is kind of ill conceived anyway. It doesn't tell how the table or headstock move directly. It tells how much the lead screws rotate. You still need to know how much backlash you have in each axis and which direction you are turning the hand wheels. It also will not do the type of position calculations like you find on larger machines like bolt circles and such. So it's a lot to spend to keep from reading the hand wheels.

Now the rotary table is another story. I'm always looking for new ways to use it.

Eric
 
I gather that they have compensated for backlash to a certain extent, I don't see a lot of comments from people who actually use it saying that it's terrible. However, It might be that the folks that buy it don't have that great a demand for accuracy.

The position calculation was a fairly surprising omission. They could have the thing sync to your phone with bluetooth and implement all that crap in an app if they didn't want to build a more robust display. Given the cost of the unit and the how cheap displays are I think this was a silly omission; the Sherline DRO is really weak in the bang for buck department.
 
BiggerNoise said:
I gather that they have compensated for backlash to a certain extent, I don't see a lot of comments from people who actually use it saying that it's terrible. However, It might be that the folks that buy it don't have that great a demand for accuracy.

The position calculation was a fairly surprising omission. They could have the thing sync to your phone with bluetooth and implement all that crap in an app if they didn't want to build a more robust display. Given the cost of the unit and the how cheap displays are I think this was a silly omission; the Sherline DRO is really weak in the bang for buck department.
Click to expand...

It is an older design that probably pre-dates smart phones and tablets by quite some time. At least from my experience it seems like the majority of Sherline users are either pure manual or CNC, which probably puts redesigning the DRO fairly low on Sherline's to do list.
 
That's a good point and probably explains quite a bit.
 
I have the Sherline DRO on both my lathe and my mill.

Sherline recently began selling a new chip for the DRO display. It allows the user to switch between inch and mm values on the display. I expect that I will probably buy the new chip for my mill, being that I plan to make some devices using metric plans and metric stock.

Two things that I don't like about the DRO are the poor visibility of the reference marks for the handwheels, and the handwheels not being resettable on the lathe -- for precision work.

A feature that I would like to have in a display unit is something to help with calculating and maintaining a feed rate in inch per spindle revolution. Not having such a feature, I calculate the required handwheel rotations per second at my intended spindle RPM. On my lathe, I have been using a metronome application on a smartphone to help with making the feed rate more constant as I turn the z-axis handwheel.
 
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BiggerNoise said:
I gather that they have compensated for backlash to a certain extent, I don't see a lot of comments from people who actually use it saying that it's terrible. ...
Click to expand...
The display unit allows one to enter backlash compensation values, in 0.0005" increments (0.01 mm with a metric leadscrew) -- the display precision of the DRO.

The inventor of the Sherline DRO, John Wettroth, registered as a member here with the user name jwet. He introduced himself in March 2021. He wrote that he invented the DRO for his own use 25 years ago, and then approached Sherline.
 
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