Hey Keith, thank you for the comments. I believe you're right, I misunderstood Teyber's question: yes, it is a dual-shaft motor (some days I'm really slow...).
You are right about adding a spacer block to the back - good idea. I will leave it as-is for now, and address that issue if I ever need to. I haven't looked at limit switches yet, but I will have to pretty soon.
The motor seems to have no perceivable shaft end-play, as this is one of the first things I looked at when deciding how to drive the screw. Apparently, these motors have a decent thrust bearing setup. For a couple reasons, this setup will be acceptable. If this were a larger lathe, such as a 8x12 like Teyber has, I would not load the motor thrust bearings like that, I'd have the screw set up with it's own thrust bearings. I don't anticipate any heavy cuts with this lathe, and I'll only be cutting soft materials with it. Plus, my lead nut is delrin, so that won't take a lot of abuse itself. This all plays into my "low-budget project" to help keep costs down and still be reasonably solid.
The crank handle was removed from the cross-slide and attached to the z-axis motor, likewise the crank handle was also removed from the compound slide (which I won't be using anyway), and will go back on the cross-slide, allowing full manual useability (except for threading, of course). Some time ago, I replaced the compound slide with a solid block for added stability.
Absolutely I will share anything I have regarding construction information and drawings. I started out with hand-sketched drawings and built my parts from there. I do have an AutoCAD file of the 3 main parts, but nothing is dimensioned or called out. I've gotten really lazy when it comes to modeling or full drawings.
I ordered my timing belt & pulleys today. Only modification to those will be to open up a 3/8 hole in one of the pulleys to 12mm to fit on the x-axis screw.
Keep us posted as to when you get your 7x10!
I originally had no intentions of CNC'ing this lathe, but I sold my X-2 mill (which was my previous low-budget conversion project), and almost immediately started planning a retrofit for this lathe.  |