Cross Slide Travel Increase

The standard saddle cutout leads to very conservative cross slide travel. You can easily increase travel to about 100mm by milling this slot longer (refer the red tinted area in the full size picture), replacing the leadscrew and making a longer standoff or adding a spacer.

If you are doing this on a manual lathe, refer to this excellent write up by John Moran. Just note that making a new leadwcrew is probably easier than making his extension. I made a new leadscrew for Version 1 of my cnc conversion (the final on eis V3).

Don't do what I did. I thought I'd run a nice clean up pass across the rough slot which SIEG had made and painted badly with that yellow stuff. I now have a nicely machined slot, but but cleaning up the bottom, I now have a hole through to the prism way. The Cast iron is very thin in this area. Not a show stopper, as there is still plenty of meat holding the saddle together, but unnecessary.

I milled out the slot on a badly adjusted large mill/drill, and the 10mm endmill cut though the cast iron like butter.