Hardinge CHNC lathe questions

I am looking at purchasing a Hardinge CHNC lathe that has been converted to Centroid. I have not gone to look at the lathe yet but am fixing to send a deposit pending inspection. The enclosure has been removed and all servo drives replaced with AC servo motors. I spoke to the owner and he said the machine is in excellent shape and was completely rebuilt 5 years ago when the conversion was done and the lathe has been in storage for about the last 2 years.

I am going to use it for gunsmithing and so far it looks like a great design for this with the short distance through headstock and it has a large enough spindle bore and is very accurate.

Is there anything I should look for with the Centroid conversion?

Any positive or negatives with the centroid controller?

Any known problems with this model lathe?

I am a little worried about not having a tailstock but chambering through the headstock should alleviate most of my need for it I think. I also have a Mazak SQT lathe but will be selling my manual lathe.

How much are they looking to get for the chnc?

If it's been sat for 2 years I'd want to see the turret being indexed for a while, also the collet closer to make sure the seals are good.

Make sure it was run with oil, if it was run with soluble oil I'd walk away from it.

Does it coming with any tooling? 16c collets are expensive, even used, the toolholders are plentifull on ebay 9last time I looked)

If it can't be powered up it's worth $500-$1000 at best

I'm converting a chnc to linux at the moment, if did it all over again I would get a Mori seiki SL0/1 (that was running)

Honestly? this seems like a terrible choice for a gunsmith. A great choice for someone who wants to do production small parts.

Never used Centroid on a lathe but on a mill it's functional... we've got a little Atrump with that control and it works well... I still have very little clue how to use the Centroid beyond basic operating, setup and programming stuff (I'm no expert in it). No particularly impressive features about it, but it seems like a practical and cost effective choice for retrofit control.

I will second that opinion. Gun smithing on a chnc?, a larger engine lathe would be a much better choice. Something like a 12 inch swing with a 1 3/8" bore, 4 jaw chuck and rear spindle spider, that's a gun smithing lathe.

The CHNC has a 2 inch spindle bore and the spindle is under 17 inches through so I can do my target barrel in the headstock. I already have a Mazak SQT I can do some some work on. I am building a chuck similar to the True bore alignment system that I can use on the Mazak. I wouldn't be using the collet closer or collets on the Hardinge. I would either build a chuck for it. I do not want to swat out chucks on the Mazak often. It can be a pain in the but since it has a bar feeder and the weight of the chuck.


The lathe powers up everything is tight and looks good. The conversion was done by Centroid and looks great. The guy that has it retired. It has a good bit of tooling I would only use this for cutting barrels tennons and chambering. I have a manual and another CNC lathe. I have thought about doing the barrels on the mill with thread mill but I am limited to shorter barrels.

cgmaster said:

The lathe powers up everything is tight and looks good.

Click to expand...

Does the turret index correctly?

Centroid is a very basic controller. IIRC, you do not have a canned threading cycle. Since the control is only 2 axis, you can't add threading either. Then you could also have issue with boring/cutting tapers. It all depends on the resolution on the servo motors.
JR