Originally Posted by
DICKEYBIRD
Yup, been running an old XP box & Mach3 with a PP myself for several years now. I can tell you from my experience that my lathe will thread pretty well in acetal & aluminum but is iffy on steel in general & for sure above about 5/8" diameter. The spindle speed is just plain not steady enough to allow the Z to track accurately enough on single pulse per rev indexing. If you have a hugely torquey, rock-solid low speed on your spindle, it's fine. Otherwise you need to jump right past single PPR indexing & go straight to a proper encoder. I'm setting up my Acorn with a 2000 line/8000 PPR encoder. I'm sure the Kflop, CSMIO, Galil and maybe a couple others can do it with Mach and a proper encoder but I was SO READY for a complete move away from Mach. I don't have the conversion completed yet but the ones I've seen on the web look great. YMMV