[Smertrios]

First thing when I got it there was no power to the motor the controller was bad. I got a replacement from the seller for the cost of shipping the broken controller to them. They said it "worked" but had to play with it and I assume that had to mean they adjusted something with the electronics. I also thought it was weird they did not send back the original controller!

I broke my leg and for years didn't do anything with the lathe at least until a few months ago and almost right away the controller goes bad! I figure its been too long since buying it to expect more help and didn't even try. So it sat until tuesday of last week when I had to use it. I hooked it upto a make shift motion controller I saw on youtube consisting of a rectifier and a light dimmer switch. That was not effective although it did make it spin any load on the motor would make it twitchy. The twitchyness also destroyed the PLASTIC molded in KEY on the motors pinion gear. I milled a 1/8 diameter hole into the pinion gear and pressed a 1/8 dowel pin into it. That was a good fix for that and my 42 volt power supply for my cnc mill worked great to power the lathe.

Thats 2 problems! So now here I am 2 days into the making of 400 metal parts that need a hole in them. With 10 left the tail stock crank handle starts moving out the back end instead of pushing the drill into the part. I do not know what I am going to do about this just yet but considering how hard it got to turn the crank handle about half way through those parts I am thinking I could use a ball bearing. My hands would thank me for that! BTW I did use oil on the oil port liberally but I dont think that port is very good at reaching the wear surfaces that useto keep the crank handle in place.

Any suggestions for a fix or replacement?

[Smertrios]

I turned the lead screw to fit a skate bearing then bored the black "cap" to fit the bearing. Only thing left is to drill 4 holes into the tail stock to capture the "cap" and hold it tight against the tailstock.

[dkowalcz]

Good stuff! This month marks 20yrs that I've had my 7x10 mini, and I've used it for production at least 80% of those years.

Every single part on the machine has been upgraded - even the bed when it got too worn out to work anymore.

It's fun - these machines are basically "kits" that can be used as-is or built on. So get used to applying some ingenuity.

I'd suggest just mounting the drill in the toolpost. Easy to set and feed with CNC, slightly less so if manual but the finest auto-feed is .004" per rev if I remember correctly (with no mods).