I’ve had my converted Sieg X3 for four years now. I used an off-the-shelf kit for the mechanicals of the initial conversion, sourced from the now-defunct ProMiCA…

Mating the Head to the Z Slide Looking at the mounting of the Tormach head vs the X3 Z slide, it’s a bit eerie how close these…

One of my buddies that owns a pickup truck gave me a hand, and we picked up the spindle head at the local freight depot last night….

New part for the build arrived today. 70 ohm, 300W braking resistor, for the VFD. Cheap from ebay. So cheap that one of the end caps was…

My VFD showed up today, so I got it up and running with the Tormach motor. No real mystery to wiring up the basics: 120VAC single phase…

After some thinking, it may make more sense to modify the Tormach casting rather than the Z slide on the X3. I took some measurements and did…

I caught the nasty cold going around the office, but I’m trying not to let it totally kill my productivity. So, I forced myself to get a…

So my 2-4-6 blocks showed up today. This is my first time seeing them in person, they’re serious chunks of metal – upwards of 10lbs each. I…

Started out Saturday morning taking the X3 head off to take a look. Comparatively impressed at the quality of the machining here, makes the Tormach head look…

Back at it on Sunday morning. My first order of business was to work out how to capture that 35mm round boss that protrudes out of the…

And now, the moment probably nobody but me had been waiting for… The test fit! Looking down into the top of the casting, you can see the…

Just a little bit of progress tonight. A couple of the filler plugs were slightly proud, so the washers backing up the socket head cap screws weren’t…

I had a little time late in the day today to get some more cosmetic cleanup done. I dialed in the center of the bore and cleaned…

Applying filler and sanding over the last couple days. After finishing the filler and sanding, I cleaned everything up and masked off the machined surfaces. I set…