WARCO WM-250 lathe family and WM16 mill - 001

I am thinking of fitting a DRO to my WM16 mill but a bit confused as to the one to fit. When I spoke to Warco they said they fitted a 500mm and 150mm to the X,Y axis. Is it because 500mm is the maximum on the GS30 range? Here on the forum I read of people fitting a 600mm to the x axis. Has anyone fitted the GS10 scale that goes upto 1500mm max. I have not seen a factory fitted scale so what is the best position to fit the x scale "front" or "rear" ? and would I have to remove the table to drill if mounted in the rear positon. Any help or advice would be appreciated

I prefer front mounting for the X axis as long as I can use the slide lock.

Wind the table all the way to the right and mark with felt tip pen at the left making sure the mark is on the top and bottom of the table, cross slide. Wind slide all the way to the left and measure the distance between the two marks. This is the longest travel the slide can do and will be the minimum length of slide + about an inch for the end mountings. the Warco x travel is 480mm so you need a minimum of a 500mm slide.warco only go up to 500mm but arc euro trade do a 600mm one. The Warco Y axis travel is 175mm so I would use the 200mm slide.

I------------------------I

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Measure between the two marks above.

Edited By David Clark 1 on 02/10/2015 20:07:28

I have front mounted my X axis DRO & the Y axis on the left hand side.. Arc Euro type with remote read out. My WM16 has the long table -700mm so I fitted the 20"/600mm slide ( X ) & the 8"/200mm ( Y ) There are pics in my album of fitting. I did not remove the table for fitting. just the left hand wheel & end casting for easier access, drilling the cast was not to difficult as didn't come across any hard spots.

thank you for the response from everyone, I now know which way to go. Warco offer a two or three axis readout display (for the same price). does anyone know if the built in z axis slide will work with these displays or is it a waste of time to fit an additional z axis readout and just use the built in one?

The built in one is just a 4" vertical scale fitted in to the casing, which is all I have used so far... I haven't found the need for an extra Z scale...yet.

If you are working on larger items then the Z-axis that is fitted may be a bit limiting as it only works on the quill movement. If you need to move the head either to cover the size of the job or to change tooling you will loose any settings from the quill.

I would get the 3 axis display as it will allow you to add the longer x axis scale at a later date when you find its needed.

I usually have no problems installing and removing 2MT fittings to my WM16 mill until this afternoon. I wanted to remove the collet chuck but after several attempts the thing remained firmly stuck.

In the end I removed the draw bar and did not twig at first but comparing it to the other metric draw bar supplied with the machine I could see the problem. The large diameter short sleeve had come adrift and had ridden up to the top near the square because the pin that had secured it had sheared. If this IS supposed to be a shear pin rather than a retaining pin I cannot understand its purpose other than to give me grief.

If keeping material costs down was priority in this components manufacture then this might explain why it had been made this way. My feeling at the mo is that I’ll turn a replacement in the solid and avoid the problem in the future.

Rik

Hi Rik,

The same happened to me, shortly after I got my new milling machine (Weiss WMD25) the pin holding the sleeve on the drawbar sheared. I cleaned the inside of the sleeve and the bar, and drilled a larger hole so I could use a larger diameter pin and silver soldered the parts. It has worked without problems since. I guess the pin wasn't big enough or too soft.

Thor

Edited By Thor on 12/08/2016 06:19:02

This has happened to me too, after some pesky tapers were well and truly lodged in there it shifted the retaining bush on the draw bar, i gently knocked it back into its original resting position and cross drilled the bush and bar together in two places and riveted them ontop of a metal block. i filed and ground the rivets flush with the barrel.

You could try the above silver soldering method if you can draw enough heat into the bar and have a super strong drawbolt. An extreme solution would be to machine a new draw bar with the whole thing as one piece, no fabrication of two parts.

Or.. even buy a new one! warco are very helpful with spares, and would always recommend a home solution if there was one. They dont sell for it's own sake if its not a good idea, very good service and staff i've found. But judging from both mine and Thors responses, this is a common problem once it's happened and a replacement would still need "rectification" at some point. 

Michael W

Edited By Michael Walters on 12/08/2016 08:19:48

Update: Nice to know I’m not on my own when shearing these pins. I Decided to give it another chance and made a replacement pin from silver steel (Stubbs not cheapo) and it sheared immediately.

One more go I thought and turned down another pin from an old, tough as boots cap head screw. This time when I tried there was a nice satisfying “crack” as the tapers parted and my collet chuck came free. I’ll put of making another all in one draw bar for now and see how the UNBRAKO solution pans out.

Rik

Rik, using a HT bolt sounds like an interesting solution. Didn't think of that myself at the time, just drilled a bigger hole. Let us know how the "cap head screw" solution works out when you have used it for some time.

Thor

I left this problem behind me when I converted from MT2 to R8.

A relatively expensive solution but it sure works!

Has anyone used their WM 250 for wood turning small items?

I was wondering if a suitable toot rest could be used...

Cheers John

Hello John. I have a dedicated wood turning lathe as well as the WM 250 metal turning lathe. When I have wanted to turn something up to about 2" in diameter I have used the the WM 250 to do it. I use the same tools as if I was turning steel etc, but i use an oil stone or the new wet grinding wheel system that you can now buy, to get a real keen edge on the tool. I use any shape of tool that you would normally use on the WM in HSS, not tipped tools. I just use the normal tool holder that is on the WM lathe to hold the tool.

I cover all the areas that I can with cling film to stop the dust getting into the WHs gears etc. When I have the machine set on Auto I also when possible, hold the hose end of a vacuum cleaner to pick up as much dust as possible. As you would expect you can turn something a lot more accurately than by free hand on a wood turning lathe.

Yes, I have, and quite extensively until I bought myself a proper woodturning lathe. There are a few issues with it, but most of them can be overcome.

The first issue is the chuck. A normal engineering chuck is of almost no use for woodturning. I made myself an adapter that bolts onto the WM250 chuck plate and has a M33x3.5 thread in the front, so that I could mount a proper woodturning chuck.

The second issue is the need to have a toolrest. The WM250 (well, the model that I have) has a saddle with two grooves in it, which can be used to mount just about anything. I made myself a steel plate with a 1" steel cylinder mounted into it, so that I could use standard tool rests. This plate hangs over the saddle onto the left hand side, as to accommodate maximum adjustment of toolpost height. However, this has some drawbacks, see below.

The third issue is one that cannot be overcome. By their nature, engineering lathes have sturdy saddles and heavy aprons containing all the mechanics for the transport both along and across the ways.They have to support the toolposts and some serious forces whilst maintaining accuracy, requiring a quite heavy construction. This does get in the way for many of the cuts required in woodturning, especially when you try and make pieces that go to the limits of the lathe, i.e. 10" diameter.

The final issue is that the entire lathe is not made for rapid positional changes with quicklock levers. Not a big deal, but over time this really can get on your nerves.

Google fuzzy turns and have a look at my work, especially the older stuff. A lot of that was made on the WM250. Feel free to contact me directly and I can provide more advice.

regards

Wolfgang

Being a total klutz, I cannot turn wood by hand. But I have turned purpleheart with the HSS parting tool on my Warco WMT300 when running at high speed - 1600 rpm - on a 20mm dia blank taking it down to 7mm in places. It worked rather well, getting a near transparent wood foil type of swarf come off. No traditional type chips at all. It ended up looking like this:

I bonded the brass bits to the wood and then machined the outside. Worked fairly well for the 3 weeks it took me to realise another part of the pen plastic had gone porous due to microcracking and the pen had gone beyond the point of no-repair.

May be of limited use but it could be a point to start from.

Regards,

Richard.

Nice to see this thread back in action, there are a lot of us that find there are various aspects of these two machines that are always questioned so nice to have it all in one thread. I suppose it could be said that to include their very close cousins within the same thread would be handy... WM280 / 290 - WM18 ?

George.

I agree, the 280/290 were mentioned by Jason on 20/01/2015.

Thor

I sold my Record Power wood lathe shortly after I got my WM250V, because I found nothing that I could do on the wood lathe that I couldn't do on the metal lathe.

I kept the Robert Sorby gouge and button woodturning tool, and my toolrest is simply 8" or so of 1/2" square section alli or mild steel (whichever I find first) clamped in the toolpost - starting parallel with the bed but can be swung to any angle.

It's true that an engineering 3-jaw doesn't hold wooden workpieces as well as a woodlathe chuck, but there are usually ways around that using soft jaws or an extra sacrificial inch or so of wood to hold on.

Here's my purpleheart eggcup, showing wear from a couple of years' daily use. Nothing in the least special, but it shows that basic woodturning ops can be done on a metal lathe.