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From the den of the Artful Bodger, a poor man's DRO!

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John Hill:
Bogs, all understood.  The long cable has less backlash and that one is screw tensioned, the cable is quite tight  but I know what will happen and that is the cable will soon cut the plastic liner of sheath and need more tension.

The cross slide cable has a rather long flexible cable to go under the lathe, I assume this would be better if I used rigid conduit instead of the sheath.

Maybe a 500 quid DRO allows you to do away with the calipers and micrometer?  If not then this is a pretty damned close second place getter with 450 quid to spend on other toys.

bogstandard:
John,

If you are not into flooding everything with coolant, as I am, you can get away with the type of digital caliper you are using actually mounted onto the machine. In fact for the topslide and tailstock, el cheapo digital calipers can be cut up to do the job. Just make up ali swarf protectors and feed the readout to a remote display head. But again, they are not overly cheap if you have to buy 3 of them.
The cross slide could be done with the type you have now. The saddle is the problem, you should see the size of my read head, it is over 3ft long, thank goodness mine came with the machine.

John

John Hill:
John, it is not that I flood everything with coolant but if I did I am sure that would be the end of directly mounted El Cheapos!

My saddle travel I can only do relative but there is 30cm to play with.

I found a length of small diameter (6mm?) steel tubing on the street today ( ::)) which maybe what I need to improve the cross slide backlash.  Mind you the backlash on the DRO is much less than on the handle scale!

Divided he ad:
Interesting.... I can honestly say I have never seen anything like this before.

It would never have even occured to me!

There certainly is an art to this bodging   :dremel:  :thumbup:

Any more accurate than the dials has to be better doesn't it?




I certainly like the way your brain works John  :clap:




Ralph.

John Hill:
Maybe it is better than even I thought!  I did a little test today, I took a few inches of 22mm mild steel bar the local engineering shop gave me from their junk box.

I faced off one end then took a very light tidy up cut for half its length and when I did I zeroed the DRO,  then I flipped the piece end for end and faced off the other and after moving the tool to the zero position I took a cut from that end. When the two cuts met I could actually see the meeting point but it was so close and I could not feel any difference.

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