Free Quill Drive Plans....

Several years ago, I designed and built a quill drive for my Chi-wanese Bridgeport clone. The design is "documented" in this thread:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/bridge...ve_design.html

I've built several of these for friends, and all have been performing flawlessly for several years now. From time-to-time, I get requests from people for plans, or pre-built kits. Oddly, they always seems to come in "clumps", with three such requests just in the last week. While I had originally considered putting this design "into production", I've never had the time to do so. Now that I no longer actually use the machine that was the target for this design, and ALL of my time is going into designing and manufacturing power drawbars and auto-toolchanger systems for all the Novakon bed mills, it's clear I'll never have the time to do anything more with this design. So, I've decided to just post the plans here, and let others benefit from my efforts.

Now, before you get too excited.... Note that this is far from a complete, documented design. What drawings there are, were created mostly as a means of creating CNC toolpaths for creating the parts. As such, there are NO dimension given, and you WILL have to do some work to figure out how it all goes together, and, especially, what the Z axis depths are for most features. All the information needed is in the drawings, but expect to first spend several hours poring through them, and figuring out what information is where. I have put these drives on several BP clones, and one genuine BP, and all fit with only VERY minor "fettling". There is also no doubt some "cruft" in there, with multiple versions of some drawings, and, no doubt, the odd error or two. All the drives I built were done with parts machined on the large fixture plate is also documented in the package. So, if you find conflicting information in several files, you can generally consider that drawing to be the most likely correct one. I've also included the actual G-code I used to make the parts, which should be an excellent source for all the Z-depth information you'll need.

A few caveats:

1) I do retain ownership of the intellectual property rights to this design. You may use it freely for non-commercial purposes. I am quite open to discussion about licensing the design for commercial purposes (in fact, I'd love to see that happen), but I absolutely forbid its use for commercial purposes without reasonable compensation.

2) I will provide essentially no support. I am extremely busy, and simply don't have time to explain it. If you have a problem, I suggest making a post in this forum, and I will check in from time to time, as I have time. I will help when I can.

3) If you make any improvements to the design, I hope you will post them here, so other may benefit.

Enjoy!

Regards,
Ray L.

Good job Ray ,wish I found this Thread when I converted my z.

Thank you sir.