Hi all,
I've been building this at home for over a year, and thought I'd show progress here. It started with a Grizzly belt drive lathe that someone tipped over and busted up the front of the carriage. I thought it would be a good retrofit candidate and bought it cheap, but later found that the bed got bent and was useless. So I started from scratch, using just the headstock and made the rest. Below are current pictures, and here is a short video taken right after getting flood coolant working, still learning how to use it so being a little conservative, especially on the cutoff.



I think that my biggest design flaw was not machining a shoulder for the z-axis rails to locate on. It cuts within .0002" in the first 4" of travel though, so not bad. Surface finish is better than I get with my 14" (unfortunately also Grizzly) lathe.

I used an Acorn controller, and startup was amazing easy considering that I'm not much of a controls guy.

Next post will be some pictures showing the build process. There are more pictures and I can shows details with the Solidworks model if anyone has questions about the design, which was based mostly upon what I already had to work with.

Kevin