I was originally considering retro fitting my Harbor Freight Mill as well, but after talking with one of the engineers over at GeckoDrive, changed my mind to build a unit intead. Point he brought up was that the lead screws on it are 16tpi, which translated to something along the lines of 1750lbs of force at the milling bit.... which would roughly translate into many broken end mills, or pretzeled lead screws. Thats why I'm building an entirely separate machine for cnc, because the H.F. mill doesn't have all that much in the working area to warrant buying replacement lead screws to get down in the 5 - 8 tpi area.
The other concern was that with such a steep tpi, it would mean that the steppers would be running hot ( constantly at high rpm's ) and the stock screws would get pretty hot as well.
-just some thoughts, I'm still learning this too......
my financed .02
arthur |