Very well done video. Anyone who is planning on installing DRO's and have never use a machine with a them, is in for a real treat. You will wonder how you got along without them.
For the hole circle function I used an Arduino Uno plus a shield with an LCD and some buttons. It gives the coordinates for each hole. The iGaging scales work fine, mounted in home made aluminium blocks held to the steel by super magnets!
@@TheMiniMachineShop X had slim mamine is an rgins mounting it on the operators side but mounting was easy. This preserved the length of the Y stroke. I'll see if I can take som Y fotos and send You. Okey, we have different machines, different chassis. Mine is an XJ9513.
The iGage magnetic scales are very touchy to alignment. If angled or bowed in any way the readings are way off and they're not that accurate to begin with. I finally went to glass scales from Ebay and have yet to regret it. I also love the touchdro look for it.
@@TheMiniMachineShop A friend had the IGage with mixed results. I am currently leaning towards TouchDRO, I do wonder how a tablet will like living in an unheated shop? Thanks for responding!
A big caution: iGage keeps the position in the scale itself and feeds it to the touchdro which runs on wall power. I did a lot of work with Yuri to eliminate power noise which caused the loss of position. I finally had enough and went to glass scales.@@olsonspeed
Nice video! The mystery item looks like a brush from a big motor or a rotary electrical coupling. Thanks for the tips on the scales--I'm installing the iGaging scales now! I made little adjustable angle blocks for the Y axis that I milled a bit smaller than angle I measured on the casting and then I added tapped holes for grub screws to jack the blocks out until they were vertical. I used a long straightedge across them and a dial indicator on the head to dial them in vertically and on the table to dial them in horizontally. My setup has the scales and read heads rigidly attached and it is repeatable but as you say, it is +/-0.001 over a few inches so far. Also I would love if you have a video on the angled support on the back of the mill column to aid in tramming! I know you have a lot videos and I might have missed it.
I do have a video somewhere but drilled and tapped as low as I could below the nut that holds the column and its a 1/2" thick 1 1/2 wide 12" long steel bar that straddles the nut and drill and tap at the top. I use the nut as the pivot point.
@@TheMiniMachineShop once I figured out how I was going to install the scales, that was the easy part, the difficulty was figuring out a good way to mount the read heads making sure they were not misaligned. I can email you some pictures of how I installed them but it will be tomorrow sometime.
Very good points, 10 microns / less than half a thou is great for these little machines. If you need a precise feature invest in a good dial indicator and put it to a reference surface on the part. Glass scales and 0.001 mm are an interesting investment if you are a machinist nerd however. Install them, put your endmill in your carefully reference point and just grab the ends of your machine with your hands and flex the whole thing a little, watch those numbers jump all around. You will inevitably go down a spiral of madness where you will no longer believe the concept of rigidity and think you were lied to in machine shop class but you'll slowly and surely come back, now enlightened, understanding it wasn't a spoon but a spring all along and the physics of machining will be intuitively imprimpted in your head forever. These little machines are the best teachers for the starter machinist, if you can master a little lathe like this everything above feels like machining in easy mode.
@@TheMiniMachineShop not too difficult my mini mill is a seig x2d the nice thing about banggood is you can pick the size scales you need and the fro control panel has all the 1/2 axis and bolt and grid functions I love it and it’s very accurate and affordable
