Lathe and Bender DRO?

[lsloth]

I am looking for any recommendations on a DRO for my 12x24 lathe. I think I am going to have to attach the y to the compound rest, if I attach it to the apron itself I do have low enough gears on the carriage hand wheel to make it really usable. I will just attach the Z to the cross-slide. Does anyone have pics of what they have done? I have been watching ebay and not found anything small enough, with me only needing 4" and 6" long scales. This has also got me thinking about trying to setup something for my pro-tools bender that I am converting to hydraulic right now.
Here is a picture of my lathe:

http://www.r65.org/lathe/lathe01.JPG

Thank you.

[Kc J]

You can set up something like this .
It sucks for production , but is better then counting turns and a lot less then a DRO .


http://users.cableaz.com/~kc.j/lathe.JPG

[TLCObsession]

did you make the brackets? Thats a great idea. I have a Logan I would love to be able to adapt my Mitutoyo (or maybe a cheap Chinese knockoff in case of disaster) to.

[Kc J]

Thats actually on my shop neighbors lathe , he made it up .
Does the job on a cheep lathe .

[d.d.machine]

Dro on a lathe
Been there tryed that, I have found that a cheap china mag back 1" indicator and a 1x2x3 block works the best. I even spent the $1,600 for a top of the line sony dro and it only last about a year on the lathe.

I love it on the mill but well never spend the $ for a lathe after going thrue two in about 2 years.

sweet coldchester by the way. I have had about 50 of them thrue the years, all the schools had them around hear and they went cheap at the sales.
Just hop you never need a part for it , I blow a gear in my 15" coldchester and it ran me $850 and took three months to get it.

[lsloth]

I have been poking around and I have found some places in Great Britain with used parts alot cheaper than going to Clausing, even with shipping its alot cheaper. My main draw to getting DRO is my poor eye sight.

[James_Fendley]

We use ours on our lathes, mills, OD and ID grinders. Our Sony will go to and hold 1 micron. The Newell sp? will take the most abuse.

At home I have Sony on my 2 Leblonds.

They make a trav-a-dial to go on the carrage.

James

[MC]

Sony DRO's are junk and have been discontinued (at least the older ones). They would give false readings...we had a couple, at least the older models. Nice looking units though. A DRO on a manual lathe is neccesary for the work we do and really cuts time down on turning manual parts. Loos to mitutoyo or most others and as you can see their are alot of ways to go.

The critical part is setup of your DRO. You will need to hold it extremely close ot the parralell plane of your ways or you will not have very good results. Some DRO's cant get down to .00002 but on most manuals lathes a temperature difference of just a few degrees makes that .00002 loose tolerance. A DRO of at least a .0001 reading is very helpfull and should be the maximum tolerance you should shoot for as far as reading on the screen. Also you want to keep the DRO out of coolant and oil so you will have to fabricate and seal a cover over them. Those that claim to be water proof never really last very long if they arent covered well. We install DRO's with aluminum angle and use silicone to seal the top where it is bolted in. If you need I can post a pic of a DRO on a little clausing.

James I would look around and ask around to see if the sony's you have are any good. They really bailed out of the market 12 years ago on the styles we had and left everyone unservicable and very innaccurate.

[James_Fendley]

MC, Just got a new sony last week from MSC. We are holding 1 micron on a PM ID grinder, checking with air gages to the size of a standard and double check off the machine with a bore attachment on a Letiz scope. I don't know what the customer checks with but if they are not right the come back. Some times we get as much as 4 microns to work with. We work in a controlled enviroment of 68*

I wish I had a picture of our German lathes. They are very acurate and have 3 axis readouts. The compound will feed under power.

Before we started ID grinding we cut 15 away on the lathes and honed to size.

Damn I can talk machining all day:smokin:

James

[MC]

hmmm Must be a re-designed unit. We were one of the first to buy the Sony's. They were LU10a's and were horrid. Glad to hear someone is having good luck with them.