You Need This Electronic Lead Screw Upgrade for Your Mini Lathe

Mini lathes are available for a whole bunch of manufacturers and they’re great way to get started with turning metal. But as useful as they are, they lack many of the features you’ll find on “real” industrial lathes. Mini lathe lead screws are particularly frustrating and most of them use complicated gears that are annoying to adjust. This electronic lead screw upgrade fixes all of those problems and is one of the best mods you can do to a mini lathe.

The lead screw moves the carriage along the Z axis and is linked to the spindle, so rotating the spindle a single time could, for instance, move the carriage exactly 0.5mm. That is very important for operations like single-point threading, because that 0.5mm is the thread pitch.

Virtually all mini lathes link the lead screw to the spindle with a series of “change gears,” which the operator must swap out to achieve the desired pitch — or to use the lead screw as a power feed. That process is cumbersome and time-consuming. And sometimes it isn’t even possible to arrange the gears to achieve a specific pitch.

An electronic lead screw solves all of that. It monitors spindle rotation and then uses a motor to rotate the lead screw, with a control interface that lets the user set whatever arbitrary pitch they want.

NanoELS H5 is a DIY electronic lead screw controller designed by Maxim Kachurovskiy. This video from FWFworks covers the build and installation. It should cost around $170 to build a NanoELS H5 and most of that is for the nice 5” Nextion display.

Kachurovskiy designed the NanoELS H5 around an ESP32-S3 development board. It monitors spindle rotation through an absolute rotary encoder, then drives a stepper motor that turns the lead screw. That fancy Nextion display lets the user set the lead screw parameters for the job at hand.

So if you have a mini lathe and are tired of dealing with those gears, this is a no-brainer.