Home-made CNC lathe using servos

Holy Macaroni! This is fantastic. What is your background? Are you or did you work in the CNC industry. Please post a recent link to purchase these trinkets. Thanks for sharing!
 
rbertalotto said:
Holy Macaroni! This is fantastic. What is your background? Are you or did you work in the CNC industry. Please post a recent link to purchase these trinkets. Thanks for sharing!
Click to expand...
Hi, I thought I replied to this post, but my reply is lost.
I'm an engineer in a different industry, in microelectronics. Metalworking is my hobby started in 2007. This lathe is my very first CNC machine.
I'm not making a lot of these trinkets because of other projects. But I'm currently making a batch of 2-inch "dodecahedron in a ball" items now. Will post a video in a couple of days.
 
Last edited:
r3292c said:
This is a thread about CNC Lathe I recently built. This is my first CNC machine, and obviously, I’m not a CNC guru. Being an engineer, I prefer more practical ways of making things rather than R&D approach with investing plenty of time, money and energy. This is also why I use simple and robust ideas instead of diving deep into unique ones and solving the problems just created.


I started with Atlas lathe bed I bought on ebay. This bed has pretty wide (1-1/2”) flat ways, so one can easily put the linear bearing rails on it.
View attachment 279146

I use THK HRW-21 slides. The rail is 37mm wide, so it uses the whole width of the bed ways. The slide block is 21mm tall (with a rail) – this is a low-profile series. I think it’s important to use low-profile one here because the overall heights of the “sandwich” limits the maximum swing over carriage. The same HRW-21 slides are used for X coordinate as well.

I put ~1/2” aluminum plate in between of Z and X rails. I milled the surfaces and made the threaded holes to mount the slides on the plate. The X-screw supports are also mounted on the plate. The milling was done on my manual EMCO machine.

View attachment 279147

There are some essential parts I bought in LMS online store. These are: the headstock casting, the spindle with 4” flange, and the milling table.

View attachment 279151

View attachment 279152

View attachment 279153

I didn’t buy the headstock assembly because it goes with 3” spindle, ball bearings and other stuff I didn’t need (gears, etc.). I installed roller bearings. The riser blocks were made to rise the headstock by 1-1/2”.

1605 ballscrews were installed on both coordinates. The bed has about 42mm spacing between the ways. So 40mm wide ballnut fits perfectly.

View attachment 279149

View attachment 279150

To be continued with Drives and Tooling.
Click to expand...
Excellent beginning. I am looking forward to seeing the rest.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top