This Touchscreen Upgrade Gives a Manual Lathe Quasi-CNC Capabilities

At one end of the spectrum, you have manual machining. At the other end, you have CNC machining. But you may not realize that is a true spectrum with useful options in the middle. Those are great if you want the real-time flexibility of manual machining, with the complex motion capability of CNC machining. In the world of mini lathes, Maxim Kachurovskiy’s NanoEls H5 upgrade, complete with touchscreen, gives you those options.

This project started as a simple ELS (Electronic Lead Screw) retrofit for desktop mini lathes. Those mini lathes almost always have change gears instead of transmissions for setting lead screw rotation to achieve a specific pitch. Change gears are a huge pain, so an ELS is a big convenience upgrade. It uses a stepper motor to turn the lead screw, so you can set any arbitrary pitch you want. It also lets you use the lead screw as a stand-in for a true power feed.

If you then add a DRO (as many people do) and an electronically controlled power cross feed, you have most of the pieces of the puzzle for something akin to CNC control. Your electronics know the position of the carriage in both axes and can move it in both axes.

At that point, you might want to do a full CNC conversion. However, that may not be the right solution. CNC control means modeling your parts ahead of time, CAM programming, specific job setups, and more. For a one-off part, you might spend more time on that than if you turned the part manually.

The NanoEls H5 gives you something in the middle ground between manual machining and full CNC machining. You can still use the machine manually, but you can let NanoEls take over for certain tasks.

A taper, for example, is normally hard to do on a lathe. If your compound doesn’t have enough travel, you’ll probably end up turning between centers with an offset tailstock and that requires a bunch of frustrating set up. With NanoEls, you can simply tell it what taper geometry you want and it will wind the cross slide in or out as it rotates the leadscrew—something you could never do accurately by hand.

All kinds of other operations like that are possible, which make NanoEls very appealing. It is all open-source and based on the ESP32-S3, so you can build one yourself if you want that capability.