Why can't I just mount stepper motors on the manual handwheels to do a CNC conversion?
The context of the question is that I used to do milling, 90% CNC and 10% manual, at the Tech Shop workshop, but they filed Chapter 7, so now I need something for my small hobby robot parts. This is 90% 6061 T6 and 10% Delrin and Nylon 6/6 work.
I have about 36"x24" floor space in the garage that I may press the wife into letting me use, so no used Bridgeport for me.
I'd love a 2 kW / 10000 rpm spindle (there's two-phase in the garage for driers and the car charger,) but that isn't to be -- and honestly, I have the patience and limited travel needs that the 3990 would be sufficient, and cost is a concern.
I like the idea of speed controlled direct drive motor (from LMS) rather than belt drive (from Grizzly) and the 2800 rpm of LMS is slightly higher than 2200 of Grizzly.
Also, if I had my druthers, I'd run LinuxCNC. I used Mach 3 and the PathPilot (Tormach skinned LinuxCNC) before, and preferred the latter. But that won't make or break getting a machine into the garage.
I have significant robotics and software experience, and enough machining to make finished parts. While I could probably build the entire CNC conversion myself, I'd much prefer more-finished kits because I'd rather spend my time building robots than building robots to help me build robots.
So, the range of options seems to be:
1) Buy manual LMS 3990 for $800, and over time, convert to CNC. Hence: Why not just turn the handwheels with steppers?
2) Buy the ready-made CNC G0704 kit from Automation Direct for $4k.
That's a long way of asking the short question that was actually in the subject line :-)
:banana: