Cnc Lathe?

[mmachining]

Like to know, what would be a good candidate for a retrofit cnc lathe.
I'am planning on buying soon but also thinking of the future. Any help would be great.

[Karl_T]

There's lots of good choices. Basically most any name brand old CNC lathe with a dead control. For small parts and high accuracy you can't beat the Hardinge CHNC. You can find a decent one with a dead/dying Allan Bradely control for about $1000.

On the complete other end of the scale, my Mazak M4 22" x 72" lathe is wonderful also. I almost bought another for spare parts at $1000. But with shipping it would be far more. Its a 10,000 lb. machine.

Karl

[mmachining]

Thanks Karl. I am thinking of a newer manual that I could convert.

[NC Cams]

You're in "luck" - there were two recent lathe retrofit threads that just ran recently.

One was started by me as "lathe retrofit" several weeks ago and another by FVP just recently (last week) - search of this site with the search engine and both should turn them up readily.

Bottom line, converting a manual to full CNC is VERY, VERY difficult task.

The old iron/dead control thing gets you the MOST bang for your buck and elimnates a major engineering headache. Good advice - take it!!!!

TONS of mill retrofits, yet very few lathe retros that are even the least bit and remotely "simple". If you can NOT do programming, you could be setting yourself up for a nightmare (see "lathe retrofit" thread that i started).

If you do anything outside of a Mach s/d stepper motor retrofit, it will get expensive and complicated. Servo based anything tends to get REAL expensive and a bit more complicated because of servo "tuning".

Retrofitting a lathe is NOT something I"d recommended for a first time CNC retrofit.

[NC Cams]

Better yet, it was easier to just find the links and post them:

Lathe retrofit threads of signifigance:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...lathe+retrofit

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...lathe+retrofit

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...lathe+retrofit

Caveat emptor!!!

[rhino]

Originally Posted by Karl_T On the complete other end of the scale, my Mazak M4 22" x 72" lathe is wonderful also. I almost bought another for spare parts at $1000. But with shipping it would be far more. Its a 10,000 lb. machine. Karl

you can't beat an old M4! i used to run one while i did my apprenticeship.
its a pretty good, torquey machine.