Not sure, but CNC mills are more common than CNC lathes. The higher price could simply be because of production costs for smaller quantities.

Paul.

Agree with Paul, CNC mills are more common than lathes, many years ago after purchasing a CNC mill I wanted a CNC lathe and could not find any so ended up buying a little lathe from Warco and converting it myself, I cannot remember Warco model number but it was cheap as they were discontinuing it, it is identical to the Sieg C1 on Arc eurotrade site.

Ian,

Permit me a little speculation here, please …

1. Our introduction to the underlying concept of CNC was the XY plotter, and there is an obvious evolutionary path from that to CNC routing or milling.

2. The 'Holy Grail' is the full 5-Axis CNC machine : **LINK**

https://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/11930/The-What-Why-and-How-of-5-Axis-CNC-Machining.aspx

3. Development effort progressed along that path.

4. A simple [2-Axis] CNC lathe can only produce a small range of shapes

5. In terms of 'perceived value' [i.e. is it worth developing and marketing this machine?] the lathe comes at the bottom of the list.

… Feed those thoughts into what Paul wrote.

Of course, however: Your perception of usefulness, and therefore 'value for DIY effort' might differ greatly from that scenario … Making the CNC lathe an excellent home-brew project.

.

Jason's comment is, I suggest, consistent with this … because Sherline is 'the amateur' raised to a power !

[and I mean that as a compliment]

Have a look around the Sherline site, and see them using their own machines to make products that they sell.

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 22/07/2019 07:57:04

And of course if you only have an occasional requirement you can turn in the mill by putting the stock in the collet chuck and clamping tool to the table!

There's one good reason for CNC lathes being more complex, therefore potentially more expensive, than milling machines – screw cutting.

Cutting screw threads requires accurate synchronisation of spindle speed to the speed of in particular Z axis movement. This adds cost of a rotary encoder on the spindle – not a huge cost in itself perhaps (£74 from zappautomation.co.uk), but this needs to output three signals – an index pulse to identify one 'home' spindle angle, plus a pair (e.g. step and direction) enabling the controller to keep track of the angle of the spindle at any instant. This should have many pulses per revolution, otherwise the controller can not be made aware of any spindle speed change at any point through the cutting pass. Software and digital electronics to keep all this sweet is non-trivial. LinuxCNC does a pretty good job, Mach3 not.

The only way around this would be to use a hugely more expensive servo motor driving the spindle, in the hope of maintaining constant spindle speed with minimal angular error, while cutting.

As has already been said I think it's down to economies of scale as there is a higher demand for CNC milling machines for the hobby market. A CNC mill is great as you can do one offs, machining shapes that would be hard on a manual machine. I feel a CNC lathe is more about making multiple parts – a less common scenario at home so it's less of an advantage over a manual lathe.