Lathe or Mill?

The 'Labormill' shares many charateristics with the horizontal borer.

Not all of 'em are that small...

This one's vertical verniers on head- and tailstock are being used to check quartering on a couple of driving wheels.

I spent an interesting year with a Yorks based company making precision microwave components, many of which had cylindrical and coaxial cavities. Their extensive CNC machine shop was largely equipped with machining centres which were essentially milling machines. As I remember, the only lathe there was a little Unimat on a shelf for the very occasional non-critical job. I remarked to the manager at the time I was surprised, he said that the machining centres could do everything they needed.

I have turned components on my CNC mill, and if you look here there's a good description from a professional machinist of using a mill for turning.

Looking at the Labormil - apart from the differing (longer travel) bed lengths and the tailstock - it's not really that different in concept from a horizontal mill. If I added a tailstock (by fitting a centre) to the overhead arm on my MF and came up with an adjustable height tool-post - I'd have something fairly similar in functionality I think - or have I missed an important difference or function here? Screw-cutting is all that comes to mind.

You can do a great many things on machines that were not designed to do a particular kind of work - and sometimes you have to - because that machine is all that you have available. This is certainly true when you are starting out and have limited equipment - but once you have a wider range of kit, then obviously you use the best machine suited to the job that's currently available.

For instance - John says a shaper cannot form a flanged cylinder "easily" - and he is right of course but I could still do it if I needed to. I'd shape channels at either end of the work between centres and then rotate the work through 90 degrees and clear the material between those channels. Possible - but why would I want to do this if I had a lathe available? There might be reasons (can't think of one off-hand) but not in the normal run of things...

So an interesting discussion but until I acquire that CNC mill with 4/5 axis control - I'll just have to stick with my old Myford for my turning needs I'm afraid.

Regards,

IanT

So much depends on the type of work you do. If the job requires the tool to be spun, then you're better off with a milling machine. If the job requires the work to be spun then you're better off with a lathe. At the end of the day, you should use the most appropriate tool for the job.

Fitting a milling vice allows milling to be done on a lathe which is a very good thing. Unfortunately the conversion makes a tiny wobbly mill compared with a real one. Nonetheless, when space is limited, it makes the lathe that bit more general purpose than a milling machine. Job done? No - it all goes wrong for the lathe the instant the work won't fit on the machine. In milling mode a lathe is constrained by swing and saddle travel, and - because the cutting forces are at unexpected angles - it's not very rigid. In comparison the table of a milling machine of the same weight has much larger capacity and travel and the machine much stiffer.

If you've got space and money buy a lathe and a milling machine. If your hobby calls for drilling and filing rather than turning you're better off with a milling machine. Even so turning is such good fun...

Dave

Modern five-axis machines are not really lathes or mills, they have all the movements of both.

Neil

Machine centres are something else. I found one for sale on the web and enjoyed reading about it having a run-out of better than 0.01mm 1 metre from the chuck, 5-axis CNC, a fully automatic tool-change carousel, and a swarf removal system. I imagined it might fit in my garage. Silly me: the first clue it was big came when I spotted it had an 8 HP coolant pump and that the swarf management system was rated to remove 200kg of swarf an hour...

Dave