Thanks! these are great little machines. As rigid as a much larger one. It will not bat an eye snapping a 1/4" tool if you have not provided enough spindle speed to get the material out of the way. Thanks for looking!

I am using the stock spindle with an MT2 Morse Taper 2. The literature says they are also available in ISO30. Not sure if this is is just for the ATC variants or manually changed units as well. It handles a 1/2" roughing end mill pretty well on mild steel, despite the fact that it's just an 800W spindle. On the back of the column the spindle electronics/driver is mounted. If you open the cover and run it with manual dial you can isolate one of the screw terminals as being a variable voltage signal based on speed. This can be used with a standard PWM driver to control spindle from LinuxCNC, Mach3, Grbl, etc. There is also a trim pot used to fine tune, and on mine was able to use this to overdrive the spindle a bit. I think I'm running 3800rpm max. I'm driving with DM556 here (5.6A peak) though I think DM542 (4.2A) should also work fine for double step as they are 3.0A steppers. In this arrangement they handle 80in/min very well and I could go to perhaps 120 or even 150 if I lowered the accel, but I personally favor accel over top speed. If KZfaq will let me paste a DRive link here, here is the documentation for this unit, including the stepper motor sheets. drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rpQgxI9LF2YIiHeDT-i_ZQw04x_TWNXD?usp=sharing

Worth noting that these spindles can be rotated to an index/lock position. You probably want to take some time with a dial early on to make sure it's trammed before cutting. I spent some time chasing phantoms at first because the head was slanted about 2 degrees and I didn't realize. :) You can turn the head to any angle, including 90 degrees and use it as a CNC Lathe with a tool in the vise. there some MT2 chuck adapters out there or put stock directly in a collet. The encoder built in is a little too coarse for threading (and it wouldn't have the torque anyway) but good for turning/facing small diameter parts like pins and such.

The X axis appears to have a 1604 screw on this machine. One side of these screws gets a handwheel and the other couples to the motor, so pretty sure they are custom cut to length and machined. if you did not need the handcrank you could just use the machien (even worn) to cut a custom adapter spacer plate to use an off-the-shelf 1604 screw and work in CNC mode only (no manual). Good luck with your project. Have a lot of fun!

@@calphis thank you for your answer. Nice to hear that in case of need i can refurbish the screws on my small lathe. I have a manual with list of parts and exploded views. But detailed drawings of parts are not reported. Congratulation for ypur machine. It is almost sure i will come back to your channel.