I have actually considered this seriously and to be honest with you I am not sure it will be the great seller one would hope. IH has sold for some time a conversion kit for the IH machines and they I suppose are making money with it but at $4-5K for their kit it is a hard pill to swallow. I have as you know recently completed my conversion and even with trying to carefully squeeze pennies and wind up with a decent servo system in the end I still managed to spend nearly $2k in parts alone.... That does not include any work on my part.(over 10 months now) I think that a very well thought out system would be desirable and for those out there that have the money would be a viable product, but the problem here is that with the cost of the machine, even my Lathemaster machine at $15-1600.00 and then the stand and add in your kit which I am sure from what you have shown on these forums would be SWEET! you are getting dangerously close to a turn key machine albeit probably a smaller version. I am very happy with my conversion and can now see the beauty of the RF45 and clones converted but you would have to be able to offer it at a VERY competitive price. You are dealing with a lot of fellows like myself here that know that with a little info from the net and some rudimentary machining skills can come up with the same thing and for probably a lot less money than you could put together a kit for. A High quality ballscrew conversion kit with motor mounts and adapters for popular sized motors( 34 size etc....) might be doable and that is what I am kinda thinking would be a reasonable product. Most here have the capabilities to wire up the controller and want the freedom to choose the motors and boards etc. The hard part for most seems to be the actual zero backlash ballscrew setup. I am sure you could come up with a clever setup for one of these machines and probably farm out the ballscrew machining or order them already machined for your kits. I have found tho that a complete bolt on system would be extremely challenging on this machine. Just for my X axis setup I chose to secure the motor mount with two additional tapped holes and the Z axis setup even with my machine coming equipped with a now unuseable to me power feed unit did not seem to lend itself to a secure and proper mounting of the Z axis motor assy. Not saying it cannot be done of course but even IH with years of experience on these machines require several additional holes drilled and tapped for the machine converison.
The other BIG concern here comes in the fact that while there are many different RF45 clones few of them are identical enough to allow a bolt on kit to be made to fit all or even most of these machines. Take my machine for instance, my millhead and column are quite different to the Grizzly and other clones I see here especially in the base casting and the webbing underneath. Mine has ribs that run underneath the ballscrew across the width of the casting. Some I have seen here have ribs only in the top of the underside of the base kinda like webbing. Does this make it impossible? absolutely not but I would be apprehensive to design one based on one or even two machines. It would take some very careful measuring of several different brands of machines to make sure it would fit a wide variety of them. I know that Enco has had several different versions of the same machine over the years now. Also the table sizes and travels of these machines varies quite a bit which would make accurately sizing the ballscrews challenging.
Just some thoughts on this. I agree wholeheartedly that these machines seemingly beg for a cnc conversion kit but perhaps if you aimed at one or two brands of machine in hopes that you would be able to more accurately be confident of proper fitment at the end user. The other trouble with this unfortunatly is the END USER. Many on here are very skilled and talented people, not all have the skills necessary to do this conversion properly and you would be dealing directly with those who do have issues and that can get pretty time consuming as well as frustrating!!!!
Again just some thoughts here I am sure others will chime in with their views as well... peace  |