# DRO Digital Read Out installation videos



## Janger (Nov 7, 2022)

I've been watching turnwright working on a DRO install which has helped me visuallize how to install my DRO. It just happens to be the same brand - shooting star - as the one I have. See videos five six and seven of his series on restoring a lathe. If you are installing a DRO you may find this helpful.


----------



## StevSmar (Nov 8, 2022)

I’ll give it a look, thanks for the heads up.

I’ve been looking through this fellows flickr photo’s for ideas:
Lathe DRO install
Customization Summary for Mill
His attention to detail is amazing.


----------



## DPittman (Nov 8, 2022)

StevSmar said:


> I’ll give it a look, thanks for the heads up.
> 
> I’ve been looking through this fellows flickr photo’s for ideas:
> Lathe DRO install
> ...


Oh wow I sort of wish I would have seen that lathe dro install job before I started mine, but on the other hand j would still be working on it if I had.  Very nice.


----------



## trlvn (Nov 8, 2022)

@Janger I've got a Shooting Star DRO on my mill and I re-did the X and Z axis installations.  The notes in the manual basically say that the rack and encoder head need to be aligned within 0.005" in 2 directions...which I found was darn hard to achieve over the length of the rack since the parts were being mounted to rough castings.

The other 'trick' in my install was that the passage for the rack through the encoder head was NOT parallel to the body of the encoder!?!  Again, the notes say this but it didn't really register with me until late in the process.  On my mill, the Z encoder is right in front of my face and visually appears to be cocked to one side.  I had to enlarge the mounting slots on the brackets I made in order to get the parts installed without binding.

Another minor item: the racks are made of steel and even though they have been in the accordion-tube stuff for their life, there was some amount of corrosion on the teeth.  I think this was making the encoder miscount the position sometimes.  I used a fine brass brush to clean off the accumulated corrosion and then applied a thin film lubricant (Top Coat) to try to prevent this from recurring.

At the end, I'm pretty happy with the DRO.  I do think it can sometimes lose a thou or three on a long, high-speed traverse.  I've been meaning to do some tests but never got around to it.

BTW, there are snapshots of the old Shooting Star web site on Archive.org:





__





						Loading…
					





					web.archive.org
				




HTH

Craig


----------



## Susquatch (Nov 8, 2022)

Wow @trlvn , reading your note makes me glad I got a Ditron. My read head gap can vary and so can the alignment and it seems to work just fine. It's easily repeatable to a tenth, and as far as I can tell it's accurate too. Matches the dials and a 12" vernier to a thou and matches a 24" scale as close as I can discern with my eye. I don't have a standard of any kind to test longer distances. I should prolly try to buy one.


----------



## PeterT (Nov 8, 2022)

Shooting Star (a Canadian company) came out when big boy industrial DRO's cost about s much as the average hobby machine itself & were generally quite bulky glass scales more challenging to integrate on smaller machines. I installed a Shooting Star on my prior RF-45 mill & happily used it for years. I was a bit suspicious of the steel rack but it seemed to work. The beauty is you just cut it off to length with a hacksaw. I never had any issues with the encoders & service was good.

But roll time forward, these days for a new machine DRO installation, there better Chinese DRO options out there now. The world has shifted. But don't toss the Shooting Star if its still working. It could see use in other homebrew devices or whatever.


----------

