My hat's off to Hood also as well as Himmy and many others for the generous time they spend helping others. My 4th axis project would have died without the 'swapaxis' tip which came from Hood. Instead, the project is slowly maturing into an actual useable product with several, possibly many people following along and duplicating it for themselves . . not to mention a spill over into servo driven lathe spindles which are borrowing the techniques.
I think this is quite a success and the kudos go to a lot of people, not just myself.
Latest neat addition is an indicator light to show when the 4th axis (or lathe spindle) is in 'indexer' mode. An indicator monitoring the lock status has been added and is shown in the latest video.
Speaking of which, I posted another video to answer some requests to demonstrate more shaving operations, particularly splines (gear teeth, pulley teeth, keyways, etc are also made the same way):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8l6lH4ydd4I think that's going to be about it for a while. I am seeking suggestions on motion controllers/pulse generators equivalent to smoothstepper.