Managed to analyze what the LLM had made at my direction and re-work it to a very simply proof-of-concept which allows one to fill in some parameters, and then have it write out a G-code file to one's Downloads folder:
Is there a good book (or web page) documenting the history of such small lathes/machines and their designers?
There seems to be a lot of misinformation (folks claiming Gingery was melting down working machines to make his, when they were iron or steel and he was casting aluminum)....
"Most households", no, but a statistically significant number? Yes.
Two of my co-workers have one each, and another is planning on buying one for her kids for Christmas --- DJI revenge-investing in Elegoo to spite the folks who left their company to start Bambu Labs pretty much knocked the bottom out of the market and halved (again) the price with the Centauri Carbon, resulting in a glut of ~$300 CoreXY printers, many of which are enclosed and hence have a higher perceived value.
Most estimates are that 2024 had ~4.5 million shipped, and 2025 looked to be even more, and no signs of the upward trajectory decreasing for 2026. For one small snapshot see the recent Snapmaker campaign for the U1, >$20M raised from >20K backers. With most sales to the U.S., for ~135M households, while not at 10%, it is almost certainly past 5%, so approximately 1-in-20 households.
Tried the AI studio as noted elsethread and it got much further along than any other tool I've tried thus far.
Working on a different project and ran out of free credits, so got out my credit card ($20 for 10,000 tokens) and a few prompts and 2,447 tokens later arrived at:
Blew through all of my credits, but didn't get to a reasonable appearance in the UI, and still haven't adjusted and then tested the geometry for the toolpaths. Will have to see if I can grok the code and edit by hand.
If I was in the market for a lathe that small, I’d probably just buy a slightly larger mill and work on rotating parts vertically, TBH.
If you were committed to wanting a small lathe and CNC, I’d just put linear rails on some of the larger 8020 profiles and rig a spindle from a cartridge spindle. Honestly, though, an 8x16 lathe is kinda bare minimum for steel parts unless you are working VERY slowly. The 7x14 I had worked, but at that scale, I’d be working hard to implement a clough42 ELS conversion so that threading didn’t suck so bad.
If this is genuinely something you want advice/help with, feel free to email me.
EDIT: I don't really have room for a manual mill which would be large enough for this sort of thing to make the parts I want(the Grizzly would be really pushing its limits).
It's more idle speculation at this point in time --- I did save the electric motor from replacing the garbage disposal recently (cracked housing) and I also have a key duplicator I fished out of a dumpster (working!) and really, it should be workable to fabricate something given the tools I have.
If you did a writeup on making a lathe w/ 8020 profiles and a cartridge spindle (source?) I'd be interested --- what would the total landed cost be?
My Elegoo Centauri Carbon and Flashforge AD5X have been pretty much plug in, load filament, calibrate/configure for that filament, print.
It or a similar printer (CoreXY, enclosed if you're going to print filaments which warrant that) from a brand w/ a good reputation should work as well.
https://studio.flet.dev/run/46tp8GPq9g/
Note that the G-code has not yet been tested (though it seemed to plot okay in NCnetic), so please verify and test and proceed with due caution.
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