Mini Lathe and Mini Mill DRO's

[redvan22]

I have two machines I want to add DRO kits to, a Micromark mini lathe 84631 and their mini mill 84630.

Out of the crates they were both pretty rough but with some advice from you all and a project or two to tighten them up like adjustable brass gibs for the lathe carriage and scraping the compound and cross slide to eliminate chatter on the lathe and some work on the mill, they're in pretty good shape now.

All I need are DRO's for them.

LMS matches their kits to your machines but they are crazy expensive and what they have are magnetic.

Amazon has glass kits but it would be trial and error to find the right kit for my machines.

So, here are my questions:
Which is better magnetic or glass scales?
Is there somewhere other than LMS and Amazon where I can get what I need?
Lastly has anyone found a suitable match for the machines I have for their shop?

Mike.

 

[Nutfarmer]

Look at dropros.com. They have a lot of information on their web site that will answer a lot of questions. The general information they have will apply to any DRO not only what they are selling. What I liked were the pictures of installations on all kinds of lathes and mills. Also search this site for DRO installations. They my not be on the particular equipment your working on,but there is a lot of information here too. Good luck with your project and remember we love pictures of projects.

 

[jwmelvin]

Magnetic scales are smaller than glass and are tolerant of contamination. But they are much more expensive.

I bought a setup with glass scales from AliExpress.

 

[homebrewed]

Don't get capacitive-style DROs, they tend to be quite noise sensitive (as in, electrical noise). I put some on my micro-mark mill and fought the noise for quite awhile before I nailed down the problem.

I'm a retired electrical engineer so have some experience with this kind of problem (and had the time to screw around with them), but I can't recommend that type of DRO for anyone else.

 

[addertooth]

And don't fully discount the handle rotation DROs for mini lathes/mills. Little Machine shop sells those too. The only thing is they measure rotation of the handles and do not correct for "slop/play" in the machines. But for lathe work, where you are typically cutting in one direction, you want to know how much to crank FROM your origin/starting cut.

 

[woodchucker]

And don't fully discount the handle rotation DROs for mini lathes/mills. Little Machine shop sells those too. The only thing is they measure rotation of the handles and do not correct for "slop/play" in the machines. But for lathe work, where you are typically cutting in one direction, you want to know how much to crank FROM your origin/starting cut.

never saw those b4. interesting. I would rather have it read the slide and any backlash.

 

[Ken from ontario]

And don't fully discount the handle rotation DROs for mini lathes/mills. Little Machine shop sells those too. The only thing is they measure rotation of the handles and do not correct for "slop/play" in the machines. But for lathe work, where you are typically cutting in one direction, you want to know how much to crank FROM your origin/starting cut.

I have not had any issue or problem with those little machine shop DROs, they do measure rotation of the handles like you said but I soon got the hang of it and find them consistent and reliable.

 

[addertooth]

I have not had any issue or problem with those little machine shop DROs, they do measure rotation of the handles like you said but I soon got the hang of it and find them consistent and reliable.

Yep! Mine are accurate too, as long as the cut is in one direction.

 

[compact8]

You may take a look at SINO scales. They make some pretty small scales which should fit your machine : http://stankoservis.by/Download/SINO/linear encoder manual.pdf

 

[redvan22]

And don't fully discount the handle rotation DROs for mini lathes/mills. Little Machine shop sells those too. The only thing is they measure rotation of the handles and do not correct for "slop/play" in the machines. But for lathe work, where you are typically cutting in one direction, you want to know how much to crank FROM your origin/starting cut.

Problem there is I scraped the compound slide and it's mating base to eliminate chatter (and it's made a huge difference) and the kit from LMS comes with a new cross slide. It took me over 20 hours to scrape the compound slide and I'm not looking forward to doing it again. The reason they supply a new slide is because they changed the threads per inch to match the DRO equipment.