I (finally) bought a (slightly) used Sieg SC4 Mini-Lathe!
I installed the machine beside my milling machine until my new workshop is ready next year. I spent the last weekend drawing & 3D Printing various lathe tools support in order to have a tidy setup for all the tooling.
I’m planning to convert the mini-lathe to a CNC lathe in the near future. I already started to shop around for various parts in order to establish a preliminary budget
- 2 x Nema 23 Stepper (279 oz/in), dual shafts so I can still manually operate the machine
- 2 x 4.2A @ 50VDC stepper drives
- 36V Power supply
- 1204 ballscrews for X/Y
- Allow for a future tool turret (ATC) prob. Nema 17 + few inputs
- Encoder on the spindle (rigid tapping)
- MESA 6i25 + 7i76
- LinuxCNC
- An old 2 core computer running LinuxCNC
I’ve decided to try LinuxCNC for the lathe. The main reason for this is the fact that I find that Mach4 is too ‘closed’ : You can’t integrate your own hardware in the core of Mach4 unless you get an NDA + dev kit from them. The other reason is I didn’t want to buy another ESS SmoothStepper that is locked to Mach4 (no LinuxCNC support).