Might as well be me as all the other people in here. I'm big and tough(not).
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:30am
No Ronaldo it was given to me. I've had it for thirty something years and done lots of work with it. all with wear in it. There are ways to overcome wear. .
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:31am
Come on. It's been building up for a while. Let it out. get it out of your system.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:33am
It's like being back at school isn't it. all that frustration and anger welling up.
and nothing you can do about it.
intrade,
Jan 6, 6:37am
Hmm i guess when your used to having to be ultra precise then you don't like stuff that is not. must be why i have to have a 300$ flashlight that works and not one from the 2$ shop that would pi$$ me off non stop and never work when i need it. It also helps to see if something is trash when you know how its made and what it looks like if its made from a pile of trash diecast moulds. My Lathe is probably ultra good to most as to me its only just good enough.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:38am
Us kiwi's can do anything intrade. with a bit of number eight wire.
ronaldo8,
Jan 6, 6:39am
Thats good because your wittering on about it is becoming quite wearisome. If you don't care to care for your tools, that's your care, not mine.
Why are you wittering on about wear by the way? Any particular reason or is it merely your springboard to another public dick stretching exercise.
It's seems that your argument, if I could call it that in humour, is that because your lathe is tired having been neglected by its owner/s making a new shitty lathe is somehow ok.
Is that the gist of it? or am I missing out as usual on all your hidden wisdom.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:40am
You're missing out as always Ronaldo.
marte,
Jan 6, 6:42am
I used a Bridgeport milling machine with a CVT gearbox in the head, great idea, you can set any speed you want in an instant & it's smooth.
Belt drive is preferred for toolmakers lathes ( so I have been told ) because it eliminates the vibration & machine marks caused by the tiny increase & decrease in rpm caused by the teeth of the gears as the engage & disengage as the gear turns. Proper polishing machines, for polishing Chrome etc are DC powered because AC power does a similar thing. Any competent metal polisher can see it in a instant in the metal finish.
And the lathe in the top video, yep, accuracy on the bed travel, any warp at all will cause the tool to rise & lower, increasing the turned dia along the travel. This would cause it to cut bulges in the metal as it travels.
Mounting the lathe bed on a 6 cylinder engine block would be a good idea, the flat head surface, plenty of mounting bolt holes, a 90° machined face on the bell housing & there's always the possibility of used the existing gearbox. & One workshop I was in had a old lathe with 3 car gearboxes mounted onto it, for 60 odd different forward speeds & 20 in reverse.
ronaldo8,
Jan 6, 6:46am
O so there is some other interpretation is there! Excellent. So what is it then?
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:46am
Have a google how the cvt box works. I think you'll be surprised.
And yeah a good range of speeds is handy, but seldom the limiting factor.
Small lathes are best for small work. big for big.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:49am
Ronaldo. we've all had our problems in life, but we can't go around taking them out on other people. It just doesn't work. Your problems are your problems and you need to sort them.
You aren't the only guy to have had a hard time. My mate had a hard time at school, just like you, and he got over it, now he uses his experiences to help other people. not to be an arsehole.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:51am
You're an intelligent guy, but you really aren't very smart.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:56am
Excuse us everyone. It should be over soon.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 6:59am
"And the lathe in the top video, yep, accuracy on the bed travel, any warp at all will cause the tool to rise & lower, increasing the turned dia along the travel. This would cause it to cut bulges in the metal as it travels.".
Not if we offset the headstock by the right amount.
And interesting about the shuddering AC/gears. I'm not that precise though .
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 7:03am
Well we mightn't be able to overcome warpage perhaps, but bed wear it works.
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 7:14am
Those cvt boxes, you can turn the input either way, and the power out always goes the same way. Tricky little buggers.
ronaldo8,
Jan 6, 7:32am
Wtf are you on about now? What a lot of waffle to avoid answering a question. In case you've lost track distracted by your own smokescreen here it is again.
What does your worn out lathe have to do with building a crap one as in the video in the first post?
Try to stick to the subject.
ronaldo8,
Jan 6, 7:35am
That wasn't in Nelson by any chance was it?
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 7:41am
There you see. Much better isn't it.
ronaldo8,
Jan 6, 7:42am
You can offset the headstock till you are blue in the face, it's no replacement for blueing the ways and scraping them till they are flat and parallel, your offset won't help you at all. The thing is going to ride a twisted rollercoaster and cannot track and therefore cut, straight. Whatever offset you set up will be lost as soon as it moves.
It doesn't require an expert to recognise the obvious, but it does take the opposite to ignore it.
marte,
Jan 6, 11:23am
Christchurch, but I have heard there was more than one made like that.
We had a big old english lathe in our work shop that they had made spacers for & lifted the whole headstock & tailstock up by about a foot so that they could machine large diameter stuff. A old flat belt driven off the original main shaft in the ceiling that all of the machines ran off, powered by a steam engine back early last century. The reminants of the shaft was still there, but driven by a little electric motor.
marte,
Jan 6, 11:39am
Nah, offsets only horizontal. Great for long tapers, like Marlin spikes. But if the carriage lifts up or down, or moves forwards or back, the tool moves up/down & forwards/back at the same time. That will increase or decrease the size of the turned part in different places.
You can actually twist the bed of the lathe so it machines the same DIA at each end, but different in the middle. Your headstock bearing will probably be bronze, and ' C ' cup shaped, you can remove some metal from the faces & re scrape the bearing using bearing blue & a scraper. That was a profession in itself once. Worn leadscrews & the 1/2 nuts for the power feed would be a different matter. I worked at a shop here where they had the solid as Lathe, huge fat bed, but the 1/2 nuts were completely worn out & the screws teeth were narrower in the centre of the screw, than at the far end, the backlash in the leadscrews was amazing, you would engage it & wait, & wait, & wait & then it would start moving. God help when the parting off tool grabbed, I used a 4x2 to lever the cross slide forwards do it wouldn't grab. But, great solid lathe, but the expense of fixing the screws would be more than what it's worth, even if it did keep going for another 70+ years. Damn pity.
mrfxit,
Jan 6, 7:00pm
LMAO, hell theres some cynical nit picking blighters here at the moment. It's basicaly a home made lathe made by someone who runs a modest size machine shop & using a mig welder. It's going to be a lot solider then the average cheap Chinese home lathe & only really intended for home use from time to time, NOT as a professional machine. Damn sure I couldn't built anything that good & don't have the gear anyway.
How about giving the guy credit where it's due. I seriously doubt any of you lot could do any better in the video suggested time frame & easily repeated or for the same probable cost .
mechnificent,
Jan 6, 7:02pm
Hi Marte. My bushes are split and can be tightened but not scraped. They are fine. I take light cuts at the end of my work and the play doesn't come into effect. .
Some people in here live in a theoretical perfect world in their heads, but obviously don't know how to deal with their own problems even. Just deny everything and everyone and they think their denial makes them somehow right. Not you obviously Marte, you use old lathes with wear in them, as do a lot of engineers. We all got taught about setting up lathes didn't we. Ronald goes on google and reads that you blue things and scrape them, but he wouldn't know where to even begin to do that, let alone use the scraper.
In the real world,where I exist, I only ever want to use a limited section of my bed travel at a time and the wear on the beds is easy to compensate for. You are right about the offsetting causing taper, but it's taper that the wear in the beds causes too. We can use the two effects in opposition through the critical travel that I always end up using. . I took out the grub screws for adjusting the headstock and made wingnut headed bolts to go in there. If I want to work at extreme distance from the chuck, or do boring work.I can adjust things in a few moments. The traveler I mill filed underneath, as I did the beds on top when I first got it to even the wear, and the wear all slopes away from the headstock. I know that. I allow for it in my adjustments and working. My carriage and cross feed I've mill filed and fitted with wingnut bolts too. It's got wear but I'm only ever using it through a short length and it works fine. Mostly anything long I want in the lathe is only going between centers for checking and so none of that matters.
My leadscrew is worn as you describe, and as you say we can work with that. The one regret I have is that the leadscrew isn't slotted. I've got a good selection of gears and if I could cut threads I'd make a new leadscrew. And it would be handy occasionally to be able to cut threads to make special pullers for bikes.
In the real world we all have to make adjustments, compensations, be pragmatic. I can do that. We all need to be able to do that. That's how the world is. It annoys me to see all these experts telling us things have to be perfect. It ain't so at all, and it stifles people, it denies them their potential if they buy into it. People that don't know, shouldn't be telling people that do know, that things are impossible We can all do amazing things if we have the confidence. We can perform miracles if we have the faith in ourselves.
And you Ronaldo. You need to get over it.
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