Duality lathes owners...

[Freddy Bastard]

I've not heard a lot of comments about the duality lathes owners. That would be cool if anyone could post some parts, videos ...

[fastlanecafe]

There was a thread here yesterday from a guy who claimed he ordered one but never got it. The thread seems to have gone the way of his lathe.

[Scott_M]

Originally Posted by fastlanecafe There was a thread here yesterday from a guy who claimed he ordered one but never got it. The thread seems to have gone the way of his lathe.

I found the "missing " post here in the Vendor discussion area.

Scott

[R.DesJardin]

I just got mine this week, I hope to test it out this weekend. Will report back then.

[benji2505]

we are putting together a tormach package in the moment and discussed the duality lathe. question to all proud owners of this piece of equipment:

how much sense does this thing really make? Is it an improvement over a plain manual lathe?

Most of our parts require tool changes (boring, cutting, threading): Does the duality lathe come with a tooling system similar to that of the mill? Do you have to zero in all new tools or can you work with tooling offsets?

Thanks for your help.

benji2505

[MichaelHenry]

I got one a few months back and have just gotten around to trying it out.

I've only used it on brass, aluminum, and CPVC, but am pretty impressed so far give the size and weight of the lathe. The accuracy in both X and Z has been 0.5-2 thousandths for me on the above materials but repeatability seems to be around 0.001 or less on repeat jobs. I was measuring a taper of around 0.001" over 3-4" length of unsupported CPVC (no tailstock) which seems pretty good to me considering the material and stickout.

My only serious project so far has been an adapter to connect the Tormach coolant line to a Loc-Line nozzle system (see picture below). It has an ~ 13/16x14 straight male thread on one end and a male 1/2x14 NPT thread on the other. It was a lot of fun to do those threads on the Duality lathe. The NPT threads were done with CAM because the MachTurn wizards can't turn fractional degree tapers yet due to a bug in the software.

The two biggest limitations I see so far are the small bore of the spindle (3/4"+?) and the relatively small HP rating on the spindle motor, but that's what you've got to expect in a lathe of this size.

Mike

[saabaero]

Any new experiences with the Duality lathe out there? I do a fair amount of threading on my manual lathe and think that would be one of the biggest advantages of a CNC lathe for me - especially with being able to pull the tool out of the thread at the end of the thread. I did get a look at the Harbor Freight version of the duality lathe and it is a little scary to me. Certainly not to the same levels of quality as the Tormach PCNC1100 and the spindle just seems small for larger diameter parts and has a small through hole.

I have considered maybe buying a larger lathe and just mounting the spindle to the Tormach bed. For the few times that I would need to support the opposite end of a part a support like that used with a rotary table could be mounted on the bed also. Grizzly has a 10" X 22" lathe where the spindle is mounted to the lathe bed and it seems like it could be removed and a mount made to attach it to the PCNC1100 table.

I certainly like the "ready to use - out of the box" approach of the Duality lathe but am a little afraid that I may find it limits what I can accomplish after spending over $1K. The other option is retrofitting my current 14X40 lathe but am not sure I want to go through all of that trouble.

I really like the Duality lathe concept utilizing the existing CNC axes and controls of the PCNC1100 that Tormach has come up with because it saves a lot of duplication of hardware!

I understand that Tormach is working on mounting a stepping motor to the Duality lathe spindle which would be nice for positioning a part (and eliminating having to buy a CNC rotary table) but I wonder about it's accuracy and load capacity and also what the additional cost will be.

[benji2505]

I received the same info that the lathe will get a 4th axis type motor at the spindle, so you can use it as 4th axis and as lathe. They gave me a time frame of another 7-9 month though.

Question to the users of this lathe: Do you have to zero in the tool each time you change the tool?

benji

[MichaelHenry]

Benji,

The lathe uses a QC tool post and MachTurn has a tool table so that you can preset any tool that fits into one of the QC holders. IOW, you don't normally need to touch off against the work, except for the first tool. There are also holders that take MT2 arbors for drill chucks.

Plan on buying extra holders if you use a lot of different tools.

Mike