DIY PowerDrive - electronic table raise/lower for a Hammer A3-31

[William Shelley]

This is a really cool mod! My new Baileigh JP-1686 is, I think, a chinese knockoff of the Felder AD741, and it has the powered lift mechanism with a DRO built-in, but has the same up/down/jog-up control scheme. I think your spring-return potentiometer control is WAY more user friendly.

One thing for any planer/jointer combo machine with a powered lift that I feel would be a huge improvement is a button that would run the table down until a limit switch was hit so you could get the table out of the way to rotate the dust guard without standing there holding the button/switch.

[Erik Loza]

Coolest mod I have seen in a long time. Thanks for sharing.

Erik

[Chris Parks]

That's cool, nice!
I've thought about adding a bolt head to the center of the hand wheel of my machine to use a drill (with socket head) to raise/lower it faster;
that's what I use to quickly raise/lower my router lift (PRL V1). Yours is a lot professional.

The big problem some have with that is on the Hammer machines their is an option to fit a height instrument into the handle and the centre bolt becomes inaccessible. Some make up a bridge piece that fits over the face of the instrument and engages the two handles. The idea of doing all that or the drill battery being flat etc did not appeal to me and the idea of incorporating a target dimension with automated rise and fall was always going to be a good one if it could easily be implemented at a reasonable cost.