I have had a Mill Turn since 2016. I bought it thinking I would get into a machining hobby as I was planning on retiring in a few years. I was also looking a a Tormach 1100 and a stand alone lathe. There was a lot of difference in the cost so I went with the Shopmaster. I was always pretty disappointed in what little I had used the machine. The controls were not stable with lots of random resets,... The machine was not accurate or ridged at all. It was more of an expensive toy to tinker with than a tool. I was used to using some pretty nice CNC routers with ATC,... and this was just not the same game. I got distracted doing some consulting and it has just been sitting collecting dust. Over the years, I've been collecting stuff to "some day" upgrade it. With the Pandemic going on this year, our Christmas was going to be pretty quite and now that I am more like a retiree, I decided to spend a few weeks and take on rebuilding this thing and seeing if I could make a tool out of it. I knew it would never be a ridged production machine, but felt I should be able to get it where it could do light work with reasonable precision and at least have control stability. I had already purchased much larger drives of the hybrid servo type as missing steps was one of the real nuisances of the machine. I had also bought the CNC4PC Ether 300, their interface boards, and their software license. Back when I bought these controls, it looked like their milling software was pretty complete but the lathe package was quite lacking. I figured that would come along by the time I needed it or I could run MACH3 for lathe work. Now, years later, that I was ready to do the conversion, I decided to take a quick look at where conversion controls were and if that was still a good choice for the upgrade. I was impressed with what I saw in the Centroid Acorn product and both their lathe and milling versions of CNC12 looked pretty good. Also, they had a lot of good reviews. They have an active forum for support. Also, thye build complete machines so I thought their knowledge depth would be valuable. I aborted on the CNC4PC and went that route. I've been pleased with that decision.

I attached the machine to the wall and put some sand bags in the base enclosure for stability. I spent a good bit of time going through alignments and determining how badly warped the table was. I had about .017" of warp as you would drive the table around under a dial indicator in the spindle. That just wasn't going to do it so I had the table ground. A really nice shop in Houston did it for me and when he found out it is a hobby, didn't even charge me. Now I can run the dial around and get about .0005" deviation which is more than good for me. I spent a good bit of time getting the tram set up and the spindle square.... Finally, it was pretty true. Still not real ridged so that means light passes but that's OK.

It was time to take on the controls and fortunately, I have a decent background in that area. I left the VFD mounted where it was and basically stripped everything else electric/electronic off. I didn't need the storage space in the cabinet so I partitioned off part of that space for my control enclosure. I went with the Centroid Acorn, a new touch screen PC, 8.5NM hybrid servo drives, encoders for both spindles for threading, inductive home switches, wireless MPG,... I used line filters on all the power circuits and shielded cable on all inputs and outputs. I have also built a power draw bar using a converted impact wrench. It works, but I think an air cylinder with bellville spring would be better and plan to change to that path. I have been real happy so far with the CNC12 software. I have tow configurations installed (one for mill and one for lathe). I have redone the panel and gotten rid of most switches. When the machine is booted up as a lathe, it automatically selects which spindle the VFD is driving and which spindle encoder to use.

This post is getting too long so I'll stop there. However, attached is a quick video tour of the machine and me cutting my first lathe part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4H1LM3mKkw&t=37s