Sherline & Taig CNC Mill & Lathe Upgrades, Reviews for Louisville, KY 40256
Many have an interest in ISO20, IS030, BT30 and 5C headstocks for both Sherline and Taig mills and lathes in the Louisville, KY. Automatic tool changers, or ATC, appeals to many people. There’s just on place to get the at an affordable price which’s GlockCNC. Upgrading to a ISO20 or BT30 is perfect for the mill. Opting for a 5C is ideal for the lathes. Obviously, you would require to upgrade the headstock, bearings and motor. High speed balancing is also a bonus. The availability of tooling for each of these designs is excellent. For 5C collet sets, you can get excellent quality from Hardinge.
Sherline headstocks and parts come in a range of designs from the factory. Generally ER16 and MT1. Both of which are very small. Sherline likewise offers WW collet sets for really tiny work. Primarily watchmakers and clockmakers use the WW collets. A lot of choose ER25, ER32 and even ER40 collet sizes with a bigger spindle travel through hole. The 5C collet for the Sherline lathe would be the very best. For Sherline mills, most really don’t care for the MT1 and hardly like the ER16. An R8 spindle with a low profile would be best. It uses one of the most flexibility and many tool choices. You can find many reviews on both the lathe and the mill. Popular designs are the 2000, 5400, 4000 and 4500 in metric and inch. The also been available in CNC, handbook and CNC prepared versions. Just recently, they have added ballscrew variations for sale. This is far much better than the older leadscrew type. Search the web if you want a review or contrast of ballscrews compared to leadscrews. There are suppliers near Louisville.
Taig also offers lathes and mills. It’s Sherlines main competition. In fact, you can find a great deal of videos and posts describing Taig vs Sherline. The Taig products provide much more stiff ways and usually more “heavy duty” in general. The Taig motors are quite weak, much like the Sherline motors. A high quality brushless motor can make the machine seem like an absolutely different mill or lathe. Taig likewise uses a nice CNC all set mill and lathe. You can likewise choose their digital CNC system which utilizes closed-looped steppers and Mach3 software application. The Taig spindles have the exact same problems as the Sherline. They are far too small. The only exception is the 5C collet headstock design they use. We will do a review of the 5C in the future. The nice thing is that they now use a ballscrew option for their mill and lathe. Plus, the deal a “gang tool” lathe. The downside with both makes is the absence of serious upgrades.
Sherline provides numerous parts and attachments, but not much to make it a much better machine. To start with, they headstock uses poor quality bearings and the bearings are too little. This implies the spindle itself needs to be small. A spindle with very little mass suggests the lathe or mill the surface quality won’t be as great and based on vibration problems. For instance, they provide numerous lathe accessories, but you can’t get a 5C headstock or ER25, ER32 or ER40. Plus, the go through hole has to be small because the bearings are little. There is a comparable concern with the mill. You can only utilize ER16 collets and this limits its usage. Of course those in Louisville, Kentucky 40256 may have different needs.
Video: Sherline CNC in Louisville
There are other machine options too. You can also purchase from Grizzly or Harbor Freight, together with other suppliers that provide Chinese mills and lathes. Obviously the quality isn’t genuine excellent. Numerous end up either very disappointed or doing a lot of modifications to get the machine to do what they want. Excellent upgrades are ballscrews, upgraded brushless motor, encoder for threading and so on.
If you want to go with a CNC machine, your best bet is the Centroid Acorn. The software and hardware is far better than Mach3 or a number of the hardware choices in the market. You can do rigid tapping and threading if you have an encoder. Plus, it provides continuous speed for turning applications. Mach3 and Mach4 were the requirement for many years. Nevertheless, they were cumbersome at finest and really only focused on amature usage. Centroid is a well established commercial manufacture of mills. A lot of which are 5 axis devices. The very best servos to use for CNC on the Sherline or Taig are either DMM, Clearpath or GlockCNC brand names. Integrate that with the Centroid Acorn and you will have a powerful machine. We will also produce reviews of the Taig CNC mill and Sherline CNC mill using the Acorn hardware.
What about a much better jaw chuck for the lathe? Numerous grumble that the small chucks won’t hold steel for cutting. The part will just fall out. On choice is to buy a headstock with a jaw chuck adapter integrated in. This can open more options for 5″ or 6″ chuck. Particularly if you opt for larger bearings.