Noob questions-- small CNC lathe

[David Fairfield]

Hi Guys!

Noob inquiry from a laserhead who hangs out on the engraver board.

I'm looking to get into a CNC lathe for the extreme miniature work that I do. That would mean brass turnings that are generally within 3mm to 15mm in length, about .5mm to 3mm diameter.

My questions are, what do I need to know, and what sorts of hardware and software would I need to have.

When I last looked into it, about 10 years ago, it looked very expensive and complicated. I'm hoping times have changed

Thank you!
Dave

[Neal Schlee]

http://www.microkinetics.com/


Neal

[Dave Johnson29]

I'm looking to get into a CNC lathe for the extreme miniature work that I do. That would mean brass turnings that are generally within 3mm to 15mm in length, about .5mm to 3mm diameter.

Hi Dave,

http://www.villagepress.com/publish_ourpubs.php
Get some back issues of Digital Machinist. It is full of helpful articles but more importantly lots of ads for small CNC stuff.

I have an Emco 5PC lathe that I may be interested in selling. It is virtually brand new having come from a College where it got almost no use. I have adapted it to a modern PC and currently runs on Mach3.

Here are a couple of other newsgroups to get some more answers from...

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Emco_cnc_users/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/miniature-machine-tools/