Pimping the mini-lathe

vibration has been my go to method but on something that big it was it was impossible so tamping it down as you go was what i was able to do. mixing that much material by hand is not the best way to go about it but that was what i ended up doing. don't care to do it again

a small cement mixer would work well but the clean up would be impossible with epoxy. if you could line the mixer with a plastic bag of some sort that might work for clean up? what ever is used for mixing gets destroyed pretty much so on something big you would need something to act as a disposable liner if a mixer was used.

I used a concrete vibration motor to vibrate the parts I made. I guess you could clean out the concrete mixer with a few shovels full of gravel and gallon of acetone after the last mix. Any remaining epoxy would be soon worn out once you used it for concrete again.

For my epoxy stuff (making diving rebreathers) i sucessfully use normal cheep candel wax. If geting out is a problem, heatgun is yourbest friend.
Mike

I cleaned up my wiring diagrams (attached). Pretty simple so far.
Mark

Just playing around, what is the syntax to use natural constants like Pi or "e" in gcode?

Mark

Given that my lathe only uses a fraction of the 7i96's capacity (2 Stepgen, 1 ENC and 1 Pwmgen) at present, would it be possible to add a further encoder through mesaflash to read a jog wheel? I looked through the bit files, and see there is one that looks like it converts to six ENC (7i96_6enc_d.bit). What would I need to do to make a 1pwmgen+ 1 addition ENC bitfile?

Actually given that jogwheels are only 100 PPR, and the normal input pins are read at 1kHz, I can't hand jog at 10 RPS anyway, so there is probably no disadvantage of puttnig the jog wheel onto general I/O except that they need a few pins.

Bonus question, would it be possible to reconfigure both the two unused Stepgens to ENC? With two stepgens, 1 pwmgen, and 3 Enc (the existing one plus two more), I could add linear encoders to the two axis, and run the jog wheel off I/O. That would be awsome for a lathe.
Mark

Good point Tommy, but then why is there a 5ENC bit file?