Here is a picture of the final wiring layout of my Lathe after installing the parallel port break out board (top left). I made use of the built in wiring trays to organize all of my wires that plug into the 96 way header on the NextMove ST stepper controller board.
Here is a closeup of the break out board and it’s acrylic mounting plate.
I converted my Scantek 2000 CNC lathe to work via Parallel port control (for Mach3/LinuxCNC software control) and have been learning how to hand write gcode (because the Linux compatible CAM lathe software options are not terribly good).
Unfortunately, the LinuxCNC software doesn’t support many of the automated cycles (G71 I’m looking at you!) for lathe turning (yet!), so I had to write up a gcode file with many manual G1 passes to cut down the cone shape you see here.
Instead of hand coding the whole thing, I wrote a small python script that automated the gcode generation, which takes 0.2 mm passes off the stock, stopping 0.5mm shorter each time from 10mm down to 5mm radius. But I did the first few by hand….
Here is a video of the process in action:
And below is the full gcode file for those who care….
Since I’ll be primarily using my oneTesla to play music, I wanted a top facing breakout (so the sparks will shoot up, instead of out to the side). Also, I wanted something more professional looking than a stick of metal taped to the top of the toroid. Here is the final product on the top of my toroid:
You can visit [ this post ] to see a video of it in action.
I used the lathe to get the general shape I wanted:
Then turned it to even up the 15 degree angle:
And this is my original 1″ diameter aluminum stock. I tapped it for the 14-20 bolt on the top of my Tesla coil that normally has a wing nut to hold the stamped toroid together, so the whole thing just screws onto the top.
This is my new extruder hot end. After enclosing my printer with an insulated box, I decided that I needed to drop more heat before the plastic entry side of the end of the barrel. I accomplished this by turning an extra long barrel out of brass, and a small heatsink out of aluminum to go between the heater and the Groove Mount.
You can see the barrel compared to the original part here:
The barrel was straightforward to turn out of a piece of 1/4″ hex stock. I put the threads on with a metric M6x1 die.
The HeatSink took more time, mostly because I had to cut the fins out of a 1″ diameter rod quite deeply with a cut-off tool.
I compressed the several hours of work on the heatsink down into a six minute video below: