Wow, I must say vince, I just spent the last 5 hours reading through this entire thread. You sir are a gentleman!

There were so many questions that I had when I first bought my 2 CHNC-2 lathes on thursday, i pick them up tuesday! And because of your detailed intructions and explanations, my conversions will go fairly quick (im thinking 2-3 weeks). I will be working on them 12 hours a day 5 days a week. But I don't think I will completely strip mine as you did, mine were takin out of a job shop, one has a fanuc, and the other doesnt have the controller. They are both in pretty good shape, one is complete and the drive went out, the other is kinda in pieces . But the complete one has a parts shute, which will be awesome to integrate.

After reading your thread, I have decided to just mount a digital microstepping stepper on the turret instead of the air motor. It seems to me that you and many others had to much issues with it. I did read read on another persons post that they could not get the stepper motor to work well with the turret because of the degree error. I don't think he was microstepping the motor, he had mentioned that he was getting 1.5 degree positional error, which is really high if he was microstepping.

I understand that tool changes won't be fast, but they should work. And they should be very accurate especially when I microstep them.

I know there is not a lot of room in the carriage for the stepper motor, so I will be modifing the mounts and extrending the shaft with the worm gear to get the desired movement and clearance.

For the x and z, I will have keling servos on them, I absolutely love the job u did on modifying the existing resolvers on the ball screw to give great feedback. I have 1000 ppr encoders that I will be adding on.

I will add to your thread by showing my conversion with pics and videos as well!

Thank you so much VINCE!!!!

Mike