Harbor freight 4x5 micro mini lathe

[antichip]

Hello,

I got the 4x5 harbor freight micro mini lathe about a year ago. As far as making sugestions on what to use please keep in mind I was laid off few months ago, so everything must be free or super super cheap. Or donations, I will gladly take others"junk"

I have recently decided to make it power feed at least, or if I can do it within my budget CNC.

The hand wheels are super small with tiny handles big enough for fingers. I cannot make it cnc as of yet because I cannot afford the parts. I do have a few dc motors with optic interrupt with about 60 counts per rev. These will be used to drive the Z. I am considering using 2, making the space between them adjustable, and off setting the pulse by 90 degrees with the distance. So if I can read the pulses cleanly enough I should have a working encoder that will track direction.
I was also going to try and use a AMC digiflex drive I got to run the spindle, but the drive is bad. So I will need to come up with a pwm driven dc motor control board if I want to control the spindle speed through computer.

I have Faulhaber gear headed dc motor with encoder I would like to use as the Y drive motor. It is a smaller motor but the gear head should give me the torque to drive the axis. The issue is that I cannot find info on the encoder. it is labled qeds-5923. All I would pull up was Chinese info on the encoder. there are 7 leads on it, 2 are for the motor, and 1 is blocked off so there are 4 wires on it that are used for the encoder.

I have a couple audrino boards. There is a sketch for them to allow them to be used with emc2. These are nice little cheap development hobby boards. It will allow for digital IO analog IO and pwm output. They are serial , so I should be able to use more than 1, but even 1 would greatly increase th IO capability of a parallel io based system for around 25 bucks give or take. They also make a mega board but I do not think that the sketch or emc2 drivers support the added capability of this newer board.

I will be leaving the z axis screw as is. The rear support block has been cut down to allow for bearings to be used between the screw and the block and the handwheel. This little job made the machine almost a dream to use.

I will replace the y screw with a 10/24 all thread so that I can make the travel a little longer and rework the support block for use with bearings as well.

I will try and get up some pictures and such in the next day or 2.

I am also doing a full model of the lathe as I am working on it. I am doing this in Solidworks. It is about 80 percent done and I will offer the drawings and dimensions when they are completed. I hope in the next week.


Well there ya go. I hope I can stay on this, or at least I don't know make some progress.

[antichip]

Well here are some of the pics that I got taken while I was working. Man it is hard to rember the camera, make sur it's charged, hands are clean, cards not full.

I have some thinking to do on the mounting of the larger pully to the z axis rod. Now of cource my issues stem from the fact that I will only use what I got now and they are not ideal to say the least. There may be a little epoxy involved by the time I'm done, thats all I'm saying for now.

I also need to spend some more time working on the control PC. But first things first must make it mechanical.