The project is for a 3D printer, in total I need four nuts. I have four lead screws driving two axis’s. Loading isn’t going to be high. I’m using the high lead screws to get the speed up.
I’ve done some single point threading on the lathe, an I am by no means an expert. The more I do reading on threading for lead screwed with multiple starts, the more I suspect that I will not have the gearing on the lathe to turn it myself. I’m working on an old engine lathe.
It may be something I see what my brother can do and see if he is able to make them and possibly abandon the idea of a tap. I will be a good project for him, he’s going to school for this type of stuff and he enjoys odd ball projects on the CNC lathe.
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The Ballistic Assistant
You will get the power requirement loading up a lot sooner than the speed!
Having had hands-on in modifying 8-inch floppy drives and the odd pen-plotter or paper-positioner / document feeder about two hundred technology years ago? Some of that on seriously "deep pockets" cold-war Government scanner contracts?
You really, really, SHOULD be using recirculating ball screws and "stock parts" ELSE anchored synchronous (toothed) belts, metal bands, taut stranded cable, even linear servo motors or "voice coil" positioning for that application, AND NOT higher-friction, higher WEAR
sliding action screws and nuts in chronic need of adjustment to try to hold accuracy over time where there is a LOT of movement, even in a SHORT time.
This is not new ground by easily fifty years, already - disk drives and printers, 3-D or otherwise. CNC critters to office automation, all types, dot matrix Okidata 82 A (toothed belt) to CNC machine-tools the size of a house.
Ballscrews or toothed belts are not a luxury for durable, low cost, low maintenance 'puterized positioning, least of all when it gets as fast and furious and unpredictable as anything "rasterized" will need to be even if it is given a few thousands of years head-start on 3-D printing of 'bergs for the next ice-age.
They are a necessity, present economics.
"Futures" OTOH?
Already "out there'.
Must have been 1969 or 1970, IEEE "Eascon" show, Sheraton, DC.
IBM had a quad booth right next to my firm's double booth. THEY had an 80,000 line per minute printer on display. Awesome critter raster-printed 2D characters so fast, all one saw was a tall stack of "superfold" paper vanish from the input stack and show up on the output stack.
"Printer" didn't MOVE the head.
AIMED a jet-stream of sticky carbon particles at that dead-tree paper if it were an open air CRT tube lighting-up phosphors, other end of a glass CRT tube with a beam of electrons.
But it was boring.
Our little nuthin'-much firm had borrowed-back a project we had done for NASA, Greenbelt's OSO G orbital solar observatory satellite. UV spectrophotometer monitored sunspot activity.
The "world's first" computerized colour digital display. On a Ball Brothers Research Vacuum-tube lab-grade industrial CRT display and heavily modified, even so.
All of 64 pixels by 64 pixels, and "bleeding edge" for its day, if you can relate THAT to what we take for granted NOW?
And yet? It was INTERESTING to watch where the "world's fastest printer" was BORING.
So we clocked more visitors than IBM... even though our piddly little annual turnover would not have bought their well-paid staff's LUNCH for even a single day.
Look at the colour digital display on even a cheap handheld.
Keep on innovating.
There's always hope....