A couple of ‘soon to be available in the UK’ lathes that look interesting

[HollowpointParticipant @hollowpoint]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>It’s about time we saw some innovation. I’ve often thought that our lathes and mills could be improved considerably with new tech. I mean they haven’t really changed for the last 100 years!</p>
The electronic leadscrew is an interesting one. If it can be controlled to do thread pitches, then surely it could also be used to cut a set length or diameter. Say you tap in 25mm and it cuts to length and then stops. Press another button and it returns to zero. A sort of middle ground between manual and CNC.

One of the things I am surprised we haven’t seen yet on our machines is bearing linear rails. They are cheap smooth, accurate and replaceable. Dare I say better than dovetails!

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I don’t see any reason you could not enter a pitch of 0.01mm and a length of 25mm which would effectively give  a fine feed rather than a screw thread, handy for boring blind holes.

This is much like the conversational functions I mentioned in the No handwheels thread. You are just manually entering numbers to control a power feed and setting end points rather than hard stops.

They do similar for mills as they do for the lathe in the No handwheel thread where you have the option of handwheels , jogging, digital handwheel and conversational.

And another half manual / half CNC lathe

 

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

What you describe is a CNC lathe with a good set of built-in wizards.  On my CNC Super7 conversion I can usually find a Mach3  wizard that does exactly what I need.  Wabeco certainly have a mill (and lathe?) using linear guides – but I’m not sure they have the rigidity and wear resistance for heavy duty machining.

https://www.wabeco-remscheid.de/frasmaschine-f1410-lf.html

 

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I would think Linear guides are upto the job of what most of us get upto in our workshops.Take the Syil machines which are epoxy granit and liner rails and upto 12Kw spindles on the medium size X7. High speed adaptive suits them well not the old chugging away with a big cut like your grandad uses.

The latest Tormach 1500 also has Linear rails

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