If you were committed to wanting a small lathe and CNC, I’d just put linear rails on some of the larger 8020 profiles and rig a spindle from a cartridge spindle. Honestly, though, an 8x16 lathe is kinda bare minimum for steel parts unless you are working VERY slowly. The 7x14 I had worked, but at that scale, I’d be working hard to implement a clough42 ELS conversion so that threading didn’t suck so bad.
If this is genuinely something you want advice/help with, feel free to email me.
It's more idle speculation at this point in time --- I did save the electric motor from replacing the garbage disposal recently (cracked housing) and I also have a key duplicator I fished out of a dumpster (working!) and really, it should be workable to fabricate something given the tools I have.
If you did a writeup on making a lathe w/ 8020 profiles and a cartridge spindle (source?) I'd be interested --- what would the total landed cost be?
one wonders what the other alternatives are.
I mentioned Taig elsethread, and the Unimat is still available at https://thecooltool.com/en/ --- for opensource there are a couple of options:
- https://www.lathes.co.uk/multimachine/
- https://www.printables.com/model/89657-3d-printed-wood-lathe...
and I've been debating on getting a small Grizzly G0745: https://www.grizzly.com/products/grizzly-4-x-6-variable-spee...
Are there other notable approaches/options?