-The dual scan lcd was barely readable so I bolted on a 17" lcd monitor. It works great and is really nice to look at even all day. You just run the VGA cable into the pendant through the hole at the bottom.

-I wanted to have a timer that always monitored how long a program was running so I bought a $10 chinese hour meter (that does minutes and seconds too) off ebay and mounted it to the bottom of the pendant. I ran its input to the "start cycle" LED so it only counts when the program is actually running. Its really useful to be able to have accurate timing of programs to improve things!

-I added a beeper so that when the "set local" button is active it continuously beeps. Its not in the pictures because its actually inside the pendant. Its tied to the set local LED with a little mosfet to turn it on. I kept leaving SET LOCAL on by accident and hitting other axes and erasing their location so thats why I did it.

-The leds on the keyboard are basically invisible from eye level so I had to keep bending down to see if they were on. I tried replacing one of them with a 3mm through hole led that I pushed in as far as I could so it was nearest the surface of the keyboard. Its much easier to see without needing to bend over at all. Im going to replace all of them like that. They are only a few cents each from digikey with shipping.

-I made some cheap simple tool holder shelves out of 1/4" pvc and cheap L shaped brackets from the hardware store, bolted to the enclosure. They work great and dont vibrate at all, and they were cheap.

-I use flood coolant alot so I replaced the metal drain strainer with a piece of plastic that empties into a 2" pvc pipe that hangs down into a plastic sump. The sump is just a black concrete mixing tub from home depot with a plastic sheet on top for the original coolant pump and a huge hole for a 5 gal bucket sized 75 micron filter to fit which the coolant drains into. It works great!

-Something else I tried to do was make a spindle load meter by connecting the spindle amp current reference output to a multimeter hanging on the enclosure. It didnt work very well with the cheap harbor freight meter I tried, but with my expensive multimeter it works great. A dial gauge with a needle would be much better..Im going to try and make something like that.