A little more information on this planned conversion. The idea is to have a fairly basic CNC lathe upon completion. No turrets or live tooling, just a plain vanilla usable machine.
The electronics will likewise be simple. I'm planning to use steppers on both axes, likely with Gecko drivers. The controller will be LinuxCNC with, most likely, Mesa cards. There will be some type of encoder for threading. The speed sensor in the PM1022 has a pickup with four magnets on the spindle. This is unlikely to give adequate resolution for threading with LinuxCNC, and I'm not confident I could decipther its signals. Thus, I'll add a slotted disk on the spindle shaft, or an encoder driven via a small timing belt from the spindle shaft. I'm betwixed and between on adding limit/home switches. Will likely be done but isn't a high priority. (The soft limits in LinuxCNC work quite well on a small machine.)
I hope to mount the X axis motor under the apron. Space is critical so not having the stepper sicking out from the machine is very desirable. It will connect to the cross slide screw via timing belts. This might be a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio. I'm leaning towards a short NEMA 34 rather than a longer NEMA 23, but that's to be determined. The plan for the Z axis motor is to place it where the existing gear box is. If possible I'll remove the gearbox, and apron, intact and save if the lathe is converted back to manual. A box, or partial box, is to replace the gear box to support the Z axis thrust bearings and stepper motor. Like the X axis it will be timing belt driven with the stepper below the Z axis screw. A box will replace the apron with support for the Z axis screw, and X axis stepper.
An enclosure is planned to capture chips. I'll likely run mist coolant but no flood coolant.
So that's the basic plan. If anyone sees problems on the horizon please let me know.
Thanks.