Vortex Rotary Attachment

Did anyone else notice the announcement by Scienci of their new upcoming release( June 1) of a rotary attachment they’ve developed for their Longmill machine? Not something I myself am interested in but I see a lot of chatter on here on the subject and couldn’t help but wonder if it would be compatible with a OneFinity. Don’t know about wiring or programming or even if it would be mechanically able to fit but the overall concept looks interesting and the price is certainly attractive(. $600 CDN ). A variation on this might be OneFinity’s next upgrade.

1 Like

Thank you for pointing this out.

Still early days (not shipping until August) but i’m intetested.

  1. Can I wait?
  2. Is it worth waiting for vs other options,
  3. Is it compatible with 1F. I’d welcome others thoughts.

It looks interesting, but I’d be a bit concerned about what appears to be the only method for tightening down the tailstock. It has a quick release to lock it in place, but there doesn’t appear to to be a crank to slide the tailstock in and out. Maybe this isn’t an issue, since it wouldn’t be rotating at high speeds like a regular wood lathe, but I could imagine that the forces the spindle applies to the work piece could knock it out of alignment.

The mounting track would make aligning the chuck and tailstock pretty simple, and the entire thing could probably be setup and clamped to a spoilboard pretty quickly. It has a fairly cheap chuck (that you’d probably want to look into replacing), belt driven by a stepper motor. The only thing that really seems to set it apart from most its competitors is that it comes with installation instructions (though specific to a different machine), resources, and support.

It seems like it should be compatible with 1F. You’d have to buy the Masso 5th axis software upgrade, maybe a stepper driver and power supply, and figure out how to wire in the stepper motor.

Another option would be to spend a bit more and get something that’s made to work with the Masso controller, like this (plus a chuck and tailstock…): CNC Rotary Table with 36V Stepper Motor – Sherline Products

1 Like

I would love to add this to my Journeyman. Wonder what all it would take to connect it into the controller??

For the record, this article discusses how to integrate the Vortex with other CNC brands: Using other CNC routers - LongMill CNC