What do you use your lathe for?

Making bits for my vintage motor cars, mainly Frazer Nash or GN .

GN, the cyclecars from the 1920's era?

Mainly model-engineering and related (I'm presently making a Worden tool-grinder - a Hemingway kit).

Of the ones-off and "specials" - years ago:

- New king-pin bushes for Bedford CA vans I owned then,

- A set of small brass bushes for one of the CAs, to take out the wear in the rod-and-clip throttle linkage that was so bad it lost a third of the motion between accelerator pedal and carburettor..

- An adaptor in snazzy black plastic plate to hold a new shower mixer-valve on the previous unit's existing holes in the tiled stud-wall,

- A stand off, in Nylon, to take the shower head further out from the wall, necessitated by the bath end being a few inches from the wall,

- Perhaps the most awkward, a special connector for a pub trade CO2 bottle, being principally a short brass rod drilled though, with a very non-standard metric thread on the outside and a pin silver-soldered through as a handle. That on a 2.5" BGSC EW Stringer lathe with determinedly inch lead-screw and 25 to 65 T X 5T change-wheels - and of course no die or chaser to finish the thread to profile. It was for a heat-exchanger central to a warm-air breathing kit used by a cave rescue organisation to ward off hypothermia in the rescuee. The heat source is the exothermic reaction between the CO2 and soda-lime.

- Assorted parts for the spoilt-raising, manual winch for a cave "digging" project on Mendip, in which I am involved when not having knees replaced. It's essentially a simple rope-reel running on plastic bearing bushes on a fixed scaffold-pole axle, and I made the two side-frames from scrap miniature-railway bar rail. ("Digging": the signs are there that a cave is down there somewhere, but its entrance is obstructed by a very deep mass of boulders we are carefully and patiently negotiating and stabilising our way through. Some 150 feet deep and still going down...)

- Oh and when I've a few minutes to spare, my steam-wagon far too long in the making!

Cheers for the replies all.

My wife has just been presented with a knurled aluminium handle to go on the potato peeler, to spare her arthritic hands. It took ages to knurl the 3.5 inches!

Apart from the odd job like that, it is a major tool used in making tools, or repairing worn / missing objects.

The Centre Lathe is the king of machine tools, being the only one that can reproduce itself.

Howard

This keeps getting quoted, but I'm at a loss as to how one would create a lathe using only a lathe? Anyone care to enlighten the masses?

Andrew

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Don't understand!

Thought that the statement was self explanatory.

With a lathe you can turn or mill. The only limits on what you can do are set by the machine and your ingenuity.

Cutting an internal key way, (I've done several ), or a gear is not impossible.

Howard

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Yebbut, on a mill you can mill and turn, so a mill could be used to reproduce itself too.

Andrew

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In a forge you can make a hammer with a hammer...

I can now grind the edges of milling cutters on my Arduino controlled lathe...the ones I have ground have a pitch of 80mm. Bob.

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If we are going to be pedantic, pouring liquid metal is not a machining process, any more than painting the finished article. Neither involves cutting material, which is what machine tools do.

Howard

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Hi Howard, well talking about being pedantic, if a lathe is going to reproduce itself, then everything about it will have to be the same shape and size and of the same material. Pretty tall order I would think. Might be able to produce a similar smaller lathe, but as has been said, a mill should be able to make a similar smaller mill.

Regards Nick.

Surely a lathe could make a lathe if you don't include making the bed as that could be cast then scraped.

A mill cant make a mill because how do you make the spindles and circular bits with a mill?

Would the main difference between a lathe and mill be that on a lathe we rotate the work and on a mill we rotate the cutter, I know that the opposite is possible on both machines but the primary functions are opposite.

Mike

Yes it can, use your imagination!

A horizontal mill can be used to turn short, large diameter parts that would otherwise be too large. See here:

**LINK**

Andrew