My son bough one of these kits and fitted to his small Conquest vertical mill . I was that impressed with quality and price I bought a two axis for my Harrison lathe and a three axis for my Harrison milling machine. I previously had a quote for many hundreds of £ to fit them out with DRO’s and had decided I could live without them.
My previous late, a Colchester Master long bed had a two axis DRO that cost many 100’s of £ 20 years ago.
. I followed U-tube videos on how to shorten the scales and did 3 of the 5 needed with success. I milled a window in the scale to expose the glass graticule strip, then using a carbide tipped scribes, reached in about 4 mm and scribed across the glass. I the hacksawed round the alloy scale and the glass snapped off. I the milled the end clan, vacuumed out clean, re drilled and tapped the 2 mm end cap screws and refitted.
Had to mill a slot in one end cap to clear the glass as I did not scribe into the extrusion far enough! The minimum lengths need to be slide travel plus 3 inches for the slider, but can be longer if you wish.
I used an alloy bar screwed to the lathe cross slide to mount the scale on with the slider fixed to the carriage. The carriage scale was screwed to the rear of the bed with the slider fixed to the carriage. The mill table scale was fixed to the table edge, the z axis scale to the mill body and slider to the riser. The cross slide was the most awkward but with several brackets mounted under the table but clearing the knee riser handwheel.
The brackets were useful but I had to make additional ones from 4mm alloy plate to fit my machines. I slotted all the mounting holes to give plenty of wiggle room to get the sliders working without any side forces. All the scales were mounted with the slider seals downwards out of the way of swarf or coolant.
The scale guards were of no use as I had no room to fit them. The kit had no fitting instructions but there was a handbook on how to use the readout. Useful to be able to interpolate rows of equidistant holes and pcd ring.
All 3 machine dro’s work well. The armoured scale lead cables are more than long enough and surplus is coiled up and zip tied to the readout bracket.
. I found a use for the holey plate, no idea what it was intended for,, I flattened one bend and bolted it to the lathe splash back