Making a combo lathe mill more useful

hedgywah

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So I went ahead and made the classic blunder

No- not engaging in a land war in Asia
I’m talking about buying a combo lathe mill

IMG_0005.jpeg
Behold the Chinesium BT250F
It is essentially a PM1030V without a power feed or QCTP mashed with a grizzly G0758 without a fine feed. Perfectly usable and I can’t get enough time on it

I already added a stepper motor belt drive power feed to the carriage which has been awesome (I’ll make a post about that later) but I would also like to make the mill a little bit less of a pain in the butt. Obviously the setup when moving from milling to lathe and back is arduous, and adding a spindle to the lathe carriage would just be more setup, which is silly when I already have a mill on the lathe!

I saw an interesting Weiss machine (the MPV290F) that has a sliding milling head which looks like it can be used to execute rotary operations on indexed stock in the lathe chuck
IMG_0004.jpeg
Looks like this could be accomplished using linear rails and a ball screw attached to a plate under the mill head, with the main challenge being a level/massive surface for the rails to be mounted to.

Anyone ever attempted something like this?
 
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