I converted a 7x12 Mini-lathe to TurboCNC years ago, when there was no space in the apartment for a machine shop, other than a corner of the inner city balcony.

http://wrathall.com/Images/My%20Shed.jpg


Since moving to a house with a basement, and getting a real lathe, the minilathe just lurked in a corner. There were a number of aspects of my previous conversion which were pretty half-arsed.
- 1 per rev spindle encoder for threading. Done with a optical gate and Schmitt trigger, the wiring was very messy.
- never installed the ball screw on X
- the plastic back gears broke, and the DC motor burnt out, so it was converted to 3ph 3/4 /hp induction motor and VFD with toothed belt drive to the spindle. Loosing the back gear meant it had little torque at low rpm.
- The bed grinder appeared okay, but the fit of the slides, and tail stock were horrible, with tiny contact points.

Figured it was time to learn to scrape in a whole machine, and the tiny size of the 7x12 mini-lathe means it is not too daunting a task.

There is a Mesa 7i96 inbound, to give this a LinuxCNC connection. I have a tiny gigabyte SBC and 10" touch screen to make a controller of matching scale to the lathe. It will take a while before I get to that part of the build.

This will be my first attempt at a multiple video series.

Mark