At the end of the last year, I’ve been running into an issue with my lathe. I have been using it to turn parts for the LAYZOR kits, but sometimes it would unexpectedly bind and stop spinning. I couldn’t see an obvious mechanical reason why that happened, so I decided to take the spindle apart and give it a full overhaul.
The spindle axle wasn’t bent, and the bearing seats weren’t cracked, which was a huge relief. Checking the bearings also didn’t produce any obvious flaws, but since they are the most plausible culprit of the binding (and since they are dirt cheap) I replaced them anyway.
I used some adequately sized PVC tube to hammer the new bearings in place without the risk of damaging them. Time to put the spindle back together!
The rebuilding went without issues. At first sight it looks like the spindle runs very smoothly once again. But I haven’t done a full-on stress-test, because I got distracted by another problem.
For some reason the CNC stepper motors stopped working. Judging from the red LEDs on the drivers, it looks like the controller is in a failsafe state. As of yet I haven’t found the root cause for this, but in all honesty I haven’t looked very hard. The controller came with the lathe, but there is not that much info on the internet about it, so I decided to ditch it altogether (for now) and use my tried and tested Geckodrive G540.
I ordered some new (long) stepper cables, added new quick-connectors and hooked them up to the Geckodrive that’s currently in use on my ShapeOko CNC router.
Finally, after some calibration, I have a working lathe once again. It’s been out of comission for about a month, so I’m happy I’m finally able to resume working on the LAYZOR kits. Let’s hope it lasts for a while now.
One more addition I really want to make is a way to quickly switch the controller between lathe and router use. As of now, I’m just swapping out the cables before powering on, but this could be handled more elegantly.
Also, I want to take the old controller box apart and see how it ticks (and why it stopped ticking …). But at least I’m not under time constraints anymore and I can take all the time I need.