Importing a cnc lathe from China

[johnno402002]

Ball screws and servo motors on X and Z. I was surprised at how big the diameter of the z screw is, makes my manual lathe of roughly the same machining envelope look like a toy. I'd have to say the whole machine is very heavily built compared to what I though it would look like, the tail stock is massive, with two locking clamps and a 4 MT.

Yes, I'm sure it will be just as good for what I need, I'm really enjoying learning how to run it,

[johnno402002]

Youtube video first project , roughing out a ball stud
All manual programming, going to rewrite it a bit after seeing it run.

[RCaffin]

the quality of finish on it is not what you would expect to see on a Hare & Forbes machine,
all the support you would get from a company like Hare & Forbes is missing.

Looks like a lot better finish to me.
And I never got any support from the Hare over several machines. I had to fix everything myself.

Cheers
Roger

[johnno402002]

Hi Roger, I'm very happy with it and the support I've got from the factory. I can't believe how much of a machine it is for the money. The only weak link is me at the moment, working long hours at work and not enough time to focus on it.
regards,
John

[RCaffin]

Support is good to have.
In my case, I will have to provide the support. But it is a somewhat smaller lathe than yours.

There I was, happily turning down a big bit of steel, and the (mechanical) power feed suddenly died. Huh?
There is daylight where a long bit of key steel should be sitting in a channel in the drive shaft. I wonder where the key went?
If you ever have to, you will find that pulling off the front apron is very messy... Tomorrow.

Cheers
Roger

[SevenQQ]

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John,
I plan to purchase similar machine. Do you buy only the machine w/o controller? What controller you will install? How much is the price of machine only? Let me know.

[SevenQQ]

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Support is good to have.
In my case, I will have to provide the support. But it is a somewhat smaller lathe than yours.

There I was, happily turning down a big bit of steel, and the (mechanical) power feed suddenly died. Huh?
There is daylight where a long bit of key steel should be sitting in a channel in the drive shaft. I wonder where the key went?
If you ever have to, you will find that pulling off the front apron is very messy... Tomorrow.

Cheers
Roger

[RCaffin]

There is daylight where a long bit of key steel should be sitting in a channel in the drive shaft. I wonder where the key went?

I found the key steel where it had slipped out. The big problem was that the gears were not fully meshed, not that there was too much wear. It was possible to adjust the meshing of the gears by moving the support cradle for the worm, but that required 'moving' the bolts holes sideways a bit. I thought I would have to drill and file to do this, but it turned out that the bolt holes had adequate clearance once I cleaned all the body filler out of the holes. Yes, the design did allow for adjustment, but the 'paint job' (ie all the body filler) had removed all the adjustment range. And whoever assembled the machine had not bothered to fix this.

This is the problem with direct imports. You have to do all the support yourself, and you also have to do the full learning curve yourself. meanwhile, the machine is off the air.

Cheers
Roger

[Tkamsker]

it is always the same i think in an environment where man hour is nothing you can not sue the manufacturer what do we western expect ? the question is if it is still a bussiness case for you or not ? what i have seen and experienced myself the answer is no but maybe things change ,..


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[johnno402002]

I finally got some time to fully set up the first job on this lathe, using onecnc xr6 lathe express to do the cad and cam, with a bit of manual tweaking. I had quite a few issues to overcome, but mostly they were me learning the whole process end to end. I would appreciate any suggestions for improvement on how I did this, I'm not really in a situation where time is money, but more interested in learning good ways to approach these things.



John

[RCaffin]

Hi Johnno

Ah - Flash. Not accepted by latest editions of the major browsers. So not viewable.

Update: having cleaned out the bolt holes in the saddle so the gears could be properly adjusted, the lathe continues to work fine a year later..

Cheers
Roger

[johnno402002]

Hi Roger, my son did the video and upload to youtube, he's telling me it's not flash. Maybe the way I linked to it? Try taking inverted comma's off this link and paste it in to your browser. '''"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ-LzZsfrgc""''

[RCaffin]

Ah well, YouTube tells me it is Flash.
Can your son convert it to HTML5? Thing is, all 3 major browsers have canned Flash.

Cheers
Roger

[johnno402002]

Hi Roger, how can I see on youtube that it's flash, my son is looking at me like I'm an old person...

[johnno402002]

I can see in the video manager that the raw file is an mp4 ? I'll see if he can get me a HTML5 version

[cnc_tobi]

Ah well, YouTube tells me it is Flash.
Can your son convert it to HTML5? Thing is, all 3 major browsers have canned Flash.

Cheers
Roger

It´s your browser how decides to play the video as flash or HTML 5, that has nothing to do with the uploaded format to Youtube.
I have Google Chrome and it plays the video as HTML5.

[RCaffin]

Actually, I am puzzled by this whole thing.
Most YouTube videos play just fine for me as HTML5 these days, but every now and then a video on a web site will be blocked by my (fully up to date) Firefox browser because it is still in Flash format. Well, that's what Firefox says, anyhow. Is it correct? I would assume so. One or two business web sites were a problem for a short while (a week or so) until they changed their videos over to HTML5, after which they were fine again.

I have not explored enough to see how to tell what format a video is on YouTube (or Vimeo) - other than seeing whether it will play.

Tobi - might I ask how you know that it plays as HTML5 on Chrome? Knowing that might help.

Cheers
Roger

[LeeWay]

It is an MP4 format. In Chrome, right click on the video while playing and it has a popup labeled Stats for Nerds. It shows lots of cool stuff about it. Not that I am a Nerd or anything. I'm not that smart.

[RCaffin]

Beats me!
Um ... Firefox uses Windows Media Player plug-in for the display. I wonder whether it's actually the Windows player which cannot handle MP4 and tries to switch to Flash, to be blocked by Firefox? Dunno. I may investigate later. As I am (still, and happily) running XP, that is possible.

Cheers
Roger

[newman55598]

I think there is an add on for flash in Firefox as I have it disabled. However YouTube still works fine for me. Having it disabled stops most of the video advertisements when browsing the web.