After wasting an hour in the scrap yard looking for some nice material to

General CNC CNC Routers
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After wasting an hour in the scrap yard looking for some nice material to make motor brackets for, I came to the realization that it was a waste of time as the Unimat DB200 was the shittiest lathe/mill ever produced. Why not just 3D pint them as the plastic couldn’t have any more flex and give then the cross slide. This may well become the world’s worst CNC upgrade for the world’s worst lathe. Now for the electronics and some coding.

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Try a small Chinese lathe or a Craftsman/AA 109 before you condemn the Unimat to worst lathe ever status. There are some terrible lathes out there.

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Looks like this should work well! A lathe retrofit is on my to-do list! http://HobbyCNC.com

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@John_Bump I guess the Unimat is not the only lathe with auto taper, tail stock tail wagging, and build in suspension on the carriage. It it workable but you need a lot of patience and don’t bother with the dial callipers. It’s a stark contrast to the solid machines and 0.0005" or better accuracy that I grew up with.

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I think you had a charmed childhood. My AA109 had the tailstock bore at an angle to the headstock, for instance, so I could only use the center at a specific measured point. MT0 tailstock taper: just try finding a live center in MT0. 1/2" thick spindle, which I bent cutting brass. My friend’s chinese lathe has so much slop in the compound, even with the gib cranked down to the point where it’ll barely move, that the tool will dig in suddenly during a cut. Another friend had the toolpost t-slot break off of his chinese lathe during use. There are, alas, a ton of terrible lathes out there.

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Those sound more like lathe shaped objects then real lathes. I will admit that I’ve never had the displeasure of working with a Chinese lathe however I have used a Taiwanese manual mill. It was a nice and solid tho. I guess that I was lucky that the shop belonged to a millwright so every thing was kept well alined and in good running order. The downside was that they were not my tools so when I moved away I lost access to them.

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I will use the abbreviation LSO from now on.