Here are some pics of my little Frankenstein. Not much, but I sure do love it being controlled by Mach.

Looks good, takes me back to my first conversion of a manual Bridgeport. How do you find it with the knee being the Z Axis? Is the weight enough to take the backlash out of it or have you fitted a ballscrew?
 I was like you and decided to keep the handles on the X and Y as I was adamant that I would use them quite a bit for simple jobs, I was wrong and a nine inch angle grinder came into play as I was too lazy to make up spacer

BTW whats got your coolant hose so excited

Hood

Yes it does look good.
Could you please do me a favour and make the pictures a bit smaller so they can fit on others screens. Bigger is not necessarily better !

Hood,
    It's the Mach. What can I say, he's in love!!!!!!  He's changed so much since he meet Mach. They are  just dancing around, all the time, doing frivolous things. Maybe the infatuation will wear off one day and they can put their heads together and do something productive. They sure are having allot of fun now though. I'm pretty sure this is going to be a long lasting love!!!!!

   Yes, the knee is heavy enough to remove any backlash it may have had. No drift,no counter weights, no break and no d_ _ _  speed. 8 in. minute is all I can get on the knee, 130+ on the x and y. I don't think this will be to big a problem though, most stuff I'll be cutting will have a low feed anyway. Spindle is to slow to feed too fast.I'm using 1780 oz.in. steppers on all three axis. The finial drive for the knee is 6-1.  I replaced the lead screw and nut, with high precision ones. I also replaced all the bearings and gears. It is pretty tight. I have .0015 backlash in the knee, .0015 in the y, and .002 in the x.

Here are a few cuts.

I have a similar machine, I used retrofit components from Elrod machine. He makes a VERY nice quill drive. It is cool in the fact that it can be manually disengaged so you can still use the quill handle when you need to. It is a great company to work with. This would really help with the speed problem in the z. I can get over 300 ipm on all three axis but I have it limited to about half of that as it is just scary at those speeds.

You can see some pictures of our machine here (towards the bottom) http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=627.0

Here is the link to the elrod site. http://www.elrodmachine.com/CNC_Z_Axis_Quill_Drive.htm

Chad

Oh yea, I saw those pics. I want to see that 5 axis monster run. You do good work. I'll have to keep an eye on you. Thanks for the link, I will check it out.

I thought about doing the knee at first but decided to go with the quill as I thought I would probably have speed issues. I ended up using a tiny wee stepper on the quill (260oz/in) with a 3:1 reduction and 5mm pitch  ballscrew, it worked great. Tool changes could be a PITA with the R8 collets being so long and thats where the knee being the Z would be good.
 Hood

I do like the knee because it has like 15in. of travel. One 1780oz.in. motor would move the knee with a 2-1 gearing, but that was all it would do. I've gotta try to put another stepper on it, Stack or 3 pulley set up just to see. I've never got the torque curve for these motors yet. That will help me make a decision.

Is that a connecting rod for a harley?