Mini mill DRO

[gary wParticipant @garyw]

Finding myself with an enforced day working from home due to the snow, I thought to myself that now was the time to start fitting my recently purchased digital scales to my Warco mini mill. Having read up on this long running topic for quite a while I opted to buy two scales, 300mm long for the X-axis and 200mm for the Y-axis, with fitted heads, from a well known supplier. These arrived within two days of ordering early last week. The job was simpler than I had thought and was over easily within half a day. Really pleased with the end results and surprised to find 0.5mm backlash present on the X-axis and over 0.75mm on the Y-axis. I would recommend to anyone thinking of doing this small but well worth job, to give it a go. All of this added accuracy for an outlay of only £58.

[gary wParticipant @garyw]

[Johan CrousParticipant @johancrous15881]

Any pics?

[gary wParticipant @garyw]

My camera batteries are on charge. As it is now -1 outside and not much warmer in my garage!, I will take some close up photos tommorow and post the best ones.

[Martin Botting 2Participant @martinbotting2]

Would there be any hints at the "well known supplier" I would like to fit a DRO to my warco mill as the hand wheel dials are a pain and when calibrated with a couple of clocks the wheels seem to tell fibs.

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

Johan,

Pics of the cheap Chinese scales I fitted to my X2 mill. I say cheap, but it didn't feel very cheap when I bought them!

Note the use of relatively flexible brass brackets rather than supplied steel brackets to move teh heads.

Neil

Z-axis

Y Axis

X Axis

[Martin Botting 2Participant @martinbotting2]

Very interesting post, thanks for sharing. The leads I take it go to a read out mounted else where, do they also feed the readers their power from this as well? I would bet if they relied on the button batteries mine would run out just when I needed them!

Off the M.E.X next week so will see if there are any trade stands with systems on offer that are simple to fit and use. My how my wish list grows.

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

Hi Martin,

The wires go to the home made unit below. the wires supply power (using forward biased red LEDs as voltage regulators! I sometimes get glitches which means power cycling the scales. I think this is caused by noise on the wires or the poor power (overall) supply so I mean to fit 1 or 10uF capacitors in the battery compartments of the scales and fit a decent PSU.

Neil

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