I'm in the middle of converting a Birmingham 13-40 lathe to CNC.
Aaron of Industrial hobbies did all of the mechanical work, now I just have to wire it.

any suggestions on how to wire from the carriage for the z axis motor and limit switch to the fixed part of the lathe in a way that will be robust and reliable?


Paul

Paul,
Do you mean for the X axis motor? The one on the carriage would be the X.

Here was what I used on a small lathe retro. I used a couple of tek cable type flexible armored tubes, the kind with the rubber overcoat. I ran the motor conductors in one tube, and encoder and limit switch wiring I ran in another seperate tube.

I ran these two cables along the back side of the lathe out past the tailstock end, and brought them up and around in a simple switchback loop. I was concerned that the flexing and rolling motion of the cables attached to the carriage would eventually kink the flexible tubing, so I got ahold of some heavy duty steel strapping. This type of strapping is what is usually used to strap loads to a pallet. What I used is 1.5" wide, about .035 thick, and is very strong and yet springy. I used this as a sort of 'backbone' for my flexible cable. I used nylon ties about every 6 inches to bind two layers of this heavy strapping to run around the inside of my flexible cable loop.

I anchored the strapping to the carriage, so that it would help with the push/pull forces on the cables. It works great.