On the lathe I used a steel disc with an approx 3/16" hole in on the edge.



On the mill I did the quickest cobble-job I could think of as a temporay thing  & and never got around to replacing it; it's a CD disc painted black & pressed on by hand over a piece of heatshrink tubing on the little Sherline spindle shaft.  I call that Tennessee engineering but it works just as well!  Sorry, no pic.

Hood, if you are not using parallel, what are you using, a smooth stepper or equivalent?

Dickeybird, lathe looks good! Hey, whatever works on the mill right? Whose to argue with positive results.

On the Beaver Mill I have USB SmoothStepper, Computurn Lathe is Ethernet Smoothstepper, Conect lathe is  CSMIO/IP-S and Chiron VMC is CSMIO/IP-A.
When Mach4 gets threading sorted out with full encoder and CSMIO I will be swapping the big lathe over to the CSMIO/IP-A.
Hood

Do you find the smooth stepper to be just as good as parallel?

I have read that parallel is still the best way to control the stepper, but it seems more and more people are going the smooth stepper route.

The smoothstepper will produce a much cleaner pulse than the parallel port, in fact any of the external controllers will.
The bad thing about external controllers is some may not support all of the functions of the parallel port, for example some controllers do not support lathe threading.
The big advantage to me with the external controller is the higher pulsrate available as I use servos. Having said that when I change over the lathe I will be using the CSMIO/IP-A which does not use Step/Dir, it is +/-10v.

Hood

Interesting, thanks for the info Hood.