Suspect the answer is you "tend" to do neither ! But if you need to tilt, how many of you tilt one way more often than the other ? Or, about the same either way (or sometimes both together for that especially strange part) ?
Reason I ask is I recently bought a 6 axis DRO and it occurred to me it would be cool to utilize the "excess" two axis by connecting used or NOS Heidenhain sine wave type (i.e. not the more common TTL) rotary angle encoders to the tilting pivot points of the universal table.
(keeping in mind the table top rotation already has an integral encoder)
Rotary encoders that would work could be bought as cheap as 150 bucks each on eBay. The front to back tilt would at least appear to be a piece of cake to mount an angle encoder on... But the side to side....that would require some major surgery to do...might even be so much surgery as to be impossible from a practical standpoint. The encoder would either have to be very small and thin...or have a very small/thin pulley for timing belt to rotary encoder mounted somewhere else under the table...but lots of stuff in the way there as well.
Another idea would be a precision digital level output (assuming the mill is kept precisely level at all times) but there doesn't seem to exist one from Heidenhain.
My take on it at present is to just mount a rotary angle encoder on the front to back tilt pivot point and forget the 6th axis. I emailed Singer yesterday to see if they had heard of anyone ever digitizing all 3 axis of a universal table but yet to hear back.
And yes I realize it's all a bit silly but I enjoy doing strange but desirable machine related things...like installing a color LCD monitor on a 1986 Maho CNC mill.
Reason I ask is I recently bought a 6 axis DRO and it occurred to me it would be cool to utilize the "excess" two axis by connecting used or NOS Heidenhain sine wave type (i.e. not the more common TTL) rotary angle encoders to the tilting pivot points of the universal table.
(keeping in mind the table top rotation already has an integral encoder)
Rotary encoders that would work could be bought as cheap as 150 bucks each on eBay. The front to back tilt would at least appear to be a piece of cake to mount an angle encoder on... But the side to side....that would require some major surgery to do...might even be so much surgery as to be impossible from a practical standpoint. The encoder would either have to be very small and thin...or have a very small/thin pulley for timing belt to rotary encoder mounted somewhere else under the table...but lots of stuff in the way there as well.
Another idea would be a precision digital level output (assuming the mill is kept precisely level at all times) but there doesn't seem to exist one from Heidenhain.
My take on it at present is to just mount a rotary angle encoder on the front to back tilt pivot point and forget the 6th axis. I emailed Singer yesterday to see if they had heard of anyone ever digitizing all 3 axis of a universal table but yet to hear back.
And yes I realize it's all a bit silly but I enjoy doing strange but desirable machine related things...like installing a color LCD monitor on a 1986 Maho CNC mill.