Easiturn Conversion

[diverjohn46]

I'm part way through turning a control-less easiturn3 into a working lathe.
I'v used control card and software from EaziCNC (CDE) which has been great to work with, especially for someone who last did contol wiring a good few years ago!
The lathe was complete but missing the PNC 3 control and the stepper motor drivers within it.

A CDE M401 card (serial controlled from the PC) is the front end, running CDE's EaziCNC3 software. 24 volt transformers a couple of rectifiers and capacitors and a pair of ARC Euro 4.2 amp stepper drivers have given me a working machine!

I had a try today at turning out some clevis pins for the model Loco as the sort of repetitive work I wanted to avoid on the manual lathe. Nice to see the machine changing spindle speed and feed rate smoothly and the end result was a fairly quick half dozen parts with a great surface finish and all to nominal size. Manual tool changing at the moment but hopefully that will alter soon!
All I need now is to sort out the second, single pulse unit for the spindle encoder and I'll be off screw cutting too!

John

[diverjohn46]

Next little bit of work I asked it to do was to turn, face and radius the end of a piece of 2" Cast Iron as a test prior to doing some buffers for the model. No problem at all once I got my head around the programming of the 'G code'.

The ability to programme a radius, or even better to programme the tool to cut two intersecting radii is a great boon. Much better than manipulating the cross feed handles and the carriage traverse at the same time!

Still need to get the single pulse per rev for screwcutting, but the next test will be to try some tapers!

[Denford Admin]

Is this the sort of thing you're making...?

I made up a few of these for Andy B to test out our latest Turning CAM software. It worked well, the biggest problem being push-off on the relatively thin shaft when threading the end so it would never come out deep enough (I decided it would be better to cut the threads by hand)

[diverjohn46]

Yes, exactly that!
I'd actually do it the other way though (or I did on the last one I made manually). I turned and screwcut the end, then took down the rest of the shaft to size and shaped the rear of the buffer head.
I then parted off from the stock, reversed in the chuck to hold by the shaft and turned and faced the front of the buffer to shape.