Originally Posted by bhowden Assuming I would like to maintain the existing manual control and power feed, am I better off converting the existing lead screw to a ball screw or somehow add a second lead screw to the the machine and disengage the existing one when runing CNC? Any thoughts on how to disengage the new lead screw when running manually? |
Any reasonable controller (I use Mach from ArtSoft) will allow you to use an MPG (a knob type wheel) to manually run the machine. If you want to get fancy you can set the lathe up with a dedicated MPG for each axis. I'm cheap so I use a single MPG with pushbuttons to set it to the selected axis.
A "zero-backlash" (well, close to zero at least) ballscrew machine with an MPG control is very nice for manual work, its not worth the extra effort to try to keep 2 lead screws on the machine, do the ballscrew conversion and you'll be set.
Also, like every retrofitter finds out, once you have the machine running CNC style you'll find out that the time you use it in manual mode is a lot less than you thought it would be, especially with a flexible control like Mach.
Good luck-
Paul T.