Donwnside to installing a scale "on it's side"

[maxime.levesque]

I want to follow Rob Renzeti's design for installing the cross slide on my Hardinge HLV:

I will also be building a chip guard with the same design.

The problem is that even the "slim scales" (slimest of the scales, ex. KA-200 ) are not slim enough to fit under the chip guard.

There is 30 mm clearance to fit a scale, the height constraint is the height of the cross slide, (note that the clearance is aprox 32mm, the 2mm is for the thickness of the chip guard).

If I install the scale "ont it's side", then I can even dit a "medium" scales, with a thickness of 25mm.

From my understanding, the only reason scales are installed "reader undeneath", is to protect them from chips, coolant and other debries that might fall into it.

Now, if the scale is underneath a sealed chip guard, junk will have no way of getting in there, so is there another reason to avoid installing the scale on it's side ?

 

[markba633csi]

No reason I can think of

 

[MrWhoopee]

As long as it is truly sealed. Chips find their way into the most unlikely places. I "discovered" one stuck in the fabric at the bottom of the crotch of a pair of Levis.

 

[ycroosh]

It's actually pretty hard to get stuff onto the glass encoder strip under normal conditions. If you manage to get chips into the scale, they will settle on the bottom. The real concern is coolant/lubricants, but if you're not planning to run high-pressure coolant on the machine, you shouldn't have any issues. Worst case - you can take the scale apart and wipe the optics with microfiber cloth/lens cleaning tissue. It's just etched glass. Nothing magic about it.