Hi all
Has any one done a conversion to cnc on X3 Mill and added a DRO system
I am fairley new to metal working allthough i have been a member of the group for some time i had a stroke and have not been able to carry on till now with the project, i have built two Shumatech DRO systems and would like to fit them to the X3 and my lath, but the X3 Z axis seems to be a bit of
a pig, any suggestions would be appreciated and for the CNC Z axis.
Regards Bill :banana:

Sorry I don't have an answer... I too have been looking around for information on this as in January I will be purchasing an X3 from lathemaster's (Fingers crossed that they have them in stock by then) and will be using my Schools lab to convert the X3 to cnc. It wuold be nice to hear from other members who have already taken the plunge into cnc with this machine. I can't afford a dedicated cnc mill so this will be my only hope.

Jeffrey Park

A guy called Dick stevens has converted one in the UK to CNC and it was written up in MEW.
Here's a link to the articles.
http://www.arceurotrade.co.uk/projects/X3-CNC/index.html

A UK firm called SimplyCNC is also doing a ready to run conversion, site at
http://www.simplycnc.com/

Tony Jeffree of Divisionmaster fame, http://www.divisionmaster.com
is also doing a conversion at the moment later also to be written up in MEW

The main differences between the three systems are Dicks drives the Z axis ball screw from a toothed belt drive at the bottom and runs on DeskCNC.
This also has a DRO fitted as when DeskCNC is run in manual mode it looses position.

Simply CNC power the quill as a Z axis which only has a 80mm travel. Their's runs on mach3. Manual mode is by MDI.

Tony's will drill the Z axis ballscrew from the top, a far neater layout and also run on Mack3 with electronic handwheels for the manual operation. This means that Mach3 will not loose position and will allow it to use the teach facility inside Mach3, something the others won't do.

John S.