I bought a HF 7x about 2004 to try and use onsite to make and modify a huge amount of circuit board standoffs.
Was doing a major retro fit / upgrade on rack mount chassis equipment. Bottom line fighting the machine ate up all the time savings of not just driving to the real shop to do it on proper equipment. Gene - you are still looking at this like a 7x lathe owner - not a CNC lathe owner. I would strip everything off the left side of the headstock, that potmetal cover plate, all gears and other gizmos. Make one large poly-V micro-v or whatever that is mounted directly on the rear of the spindle tube and another smaller by what ever underdrive ratio you deem fit to go on the drive motor. If you think you really need it put 2 pulley sizes on each end. I picked up a nice German made 0.55kW 3ph motor for mine on ebay for $30 shipped. The VFD may set me back $160 as I think I will get a 115V 1phase input unit so I can take this innertube boat anchor anywhere. I will use a 2.5:1 under drive and run the motor up to near 6000rpm. So with this config I will have full bi-directional speed control and with added breaking resistor the CSS and reversing will be almost instant. Seriously - go back to the poly-V - they are more than adequate. A shop I do work for designs blower retrofit kits and there blower flow test bench has a 15hp motor driving the Eaton blowers with a 3 rib belt and no slippage. My Uncles Okuma MC4VAE Vertical machining center has a 5 rib on its 7.5-10hp 12,000 rpm spindle, even tapping 5/8-18 it does not slip. All the extra shafts, gears and other gizmos sharing the spindle power are parasitic drag and extra weight adding to spindle inertia which fights CNC control. I'm too lazy to fight, I strip the resistance and only keep what is functionally needed. This lathe will never be going back to a manual config, so I feel no hesitation burning those bridges. BTW - Once you decide on a belt spec I found many sellers eager to provide 1 pc qtys on Amazon at great prices. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
