After a couple weeks of working on the lathe, there seemed to be too much variance in the carriage. Running it back and forth could introduce some change to the cut, some of which was because the bearing shifted a bit on the rod, and some was because the wooden layers would shift as the wear and vibration built up. As a result, Lee took some time to redesign the carriage to use a wider carriage. This created a longer base that would hopefully have less variance.

Note that the wider back board has a half leg, so the servo mounts with the lifting action still in the center.

In addition he picked up a threader that fit the threaded head of the drill. This made attaching the drill easier, in the sense that there was more bearing between the drill and the carriage. The next challenge here is figuring out how to set up the power cord to allow the drill to be screwed into the plate, without putting too much kink in the cord 🙂 This also allows the collet to stay connected when the drill is inserted or removed. For me this made things a bit easier to handle, as the bit can be installed with the drill un-attached, and I can simply do the depth set after everything is in place.

Note that the header doesn’t get reattached.

The threaded carriage board – using a heavier gauge material than the original plywood.

and progress continues! The servo’s that we were using just don’t have any lift after the power is off, so we’re going to try a heavier duty servo to see if we can get that resolved next.