Enclosure

Intro

One of the conditions the finance minister set when she agreed to me putting the lathe on the balcony was that I keep the swarf under control. For the first year, this meant keeping lino under the area, and sweeping up after every machining session.

The drip tray which is delivered with the Sieg 7x12 lathes is pretty useless.

Being able to enclose the machine and better control the chips was one of the motivations to convert this lathe to CNC.

The kick to finally start building the enclosure came when I was doing the accuracy tests. The tail stock was obviously way off, but to quantify the error and and correct it a test bar would be required. Started making a test bar, but found my MT2->MT3 sleeve combined with an MT2 center wasn't true. Next step was to make an MT3 blank taper, then machine the 60° center on the spindle. At that point, I found I couldn't get the saddle far enough to the left to machine the taper, as the motor cover limited travel. Others have just chopped a bit off the motor cover with a dremel, but by now I was fed up and decided build a proper encolsure.