The Home Machinist!

If you were ordering a DRO for our machines .. would you order the
lathe display .. or the mill display .. ??

mikeamick,

Dros Pros has a universal display for either mill or lathe. You can switch between the two with a push of a button.

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Bill

Mill -- with 3 axis. (At least. You could add 2 more if you wanted something on the tailstock and the column, but I think that's overkill.)

Lathe DROs usually only have 2 axis. The 3 axis DRO works very nicely for both milling and lathe operations. You just have to forget about the conventional X, Y, and Z nomenclature because your spinning axis changes depending which way you are using the machine.

Personally, I connected the carriage bed to the X axis, the cross-slide to the Y axis and the mill spindle to the Z axis. So no matter what I'm doing left/right is X, fore and aft is Y and up/down is Z. Negative is to the left, away from me and down, respectively. It make sense when using the lathe, since facing operations make things shorter and the tool post is on my side of the spindle when I'm turning. Similarly, milling reduces the dimensions as the tool gets lower.

But that's just my 2¢. Your opinion may differ.

Oh, one other thing: when I'm milling I set the Y axis for direct reading ("radius" in my DRO's nomenclature). When turning I set the Y axis to show the diameter of the part, which means the display changes 2 units for each unit of actual movement. A very handy feature! Some lathe handwheels are marked like that too.

Edit: I see Morph jumped in there just ahead of me. I bet the R or D feature is what he is talking about. On mine it's slightly more than 1 button: cycle power, press enter during reboot, down arrow 3 times, enter, Y, enter, up arrow 3 times, enter.

I'll check them out morph .. thanks

and torch .. I didnt know you could do that ... absolute position I knew ..
but .. current dia of the part ! ?? Thats hot ..
BTW where did you get that cent symbol .. when talking about 2cents .. smart phone ?

Alt 155 ¢
Alt 248 ° (degrees of angle or temperature)

Harold

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Wise people talk because they have something to say. Fools talk because they have to say something.

Has to be on the numeric keypad though -- won't work on the main keyboard.

These also work:

Alt 0162 ¢
Alt 0176 °

3 character codes are the ASCII character set, 4 character codes are the Unicode character set.

If you don't have a numpad (eg: many laptops) but are running windows you can click "Start" then "Run" then type "charmap.exe" and cut-and-paste the character.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention: on mine, the R or D feature can be enabled on any axis. Sometimes handy when milling using a rotary table.