Bench or stand

Bench… stand… stand … bench…

Evening all, as always the armchair and the laptop being the safest and warmest place at this strange time of year and my dreams of the new lathe are swimming in and out of the thing that holds the lug-oles apart is in another quandary I am pretty much settled on the idea of the warco WM250.. or was it the 280, Damned indecision! and was going to throw a question into the arena and ask this…

The old myford is on a stand and sits athwart ships in the workshop and while I could place the new lathe in the same place but have an open mind it could go along another wall, anyway do I buy a metal stand for the new one or build a bench to mount it on?

The floor is wooden on joists with a solid concrete base some 4 inches below and would not be a bad idea to cut the wooden floor away and pour some plinths to bolt a nice shiny metal stand too but my thinking is if i built a substantial wooden bench then the amount of c&@p i can store under it would be greater and I can make it higher or lower as I find that working on the myford my back and shoulders sometimes get very tense, and A tip is was given years ago the handles should be roughly inline with the elbows, so folks some of your words of wisdom and ideas of bench over stand or vicky versa.

May I take this opportunity to say happy new year and thank you for all the help to my previous questions and the great items that folk here have posted and given me inspiration!

I reckon the cross slide handle should be level with your navel. First lathe (ML7) I copied the Myford stand for height and kept getting backache until I put 6" of packing under the legs

I built stands for my lathes from 50*50mm RHS, much stiffer than wood, doesn't change shape with humidity and loads of storage space underneath.

Duncan Webster is quite right. Most lathes are mounted too low. My Mini lathe spindle is 1280mm off the floor, the bench it sits on is 1060mm high. I can stand at the lathe and use it for hours on end, with no back pain. As of about two hours ago (!), the X2 mill is sitting on a bench 980mm high. The mill used to be on a bench (about) 750mm high and I used to suffer a fair bit, now the handles are at about elbow height which should be better.

Also support the use of 50 x 50 RHS, which I would have used for both lathe and mill benches if I had a welder!!

Good luck and Happy New Year to everyone.

cheers

Bill

My mid sized lathe is very similar to the wm250 although not as nice but similar size.

The original stand which cost around $200 au was horrible so i ended up making a steel cabinet using 50mm RHS and enclosing it with 12mm plywood , it has a drawer ,with storage underneath on one side and a vertical slide out rack that stores my drill chucks , the face plate and 4 jaw for the lathe.

Mine is on castors to facilitate easy moving if needed but is held in place by some brackets to my bench which is weighed down with a few hundred kilos of metal stock

If you can weld ( even roughly) i feel it is the way to go but a sturdy plywood bench with timber bracing will also work ,structural plywood is more stable than plain old timber .

I'm just in the process of modifying that lathe cabinet as i made it a little high stupidly believing that the extra height would be better for my back , problem just transferred to my shoulders as i have to lift my arms up from a natural position to wind the cross slide, as Duncan posted naval height is about right or upto elbow height if you like a little more height but i wouldn't go any higher .

The other stupid mistake was setting the lathe too far back as i initially liked the small shelf at the front to keep my measuring tools on but the means to see what is going on in around the cutting tool or when threading or boring i have to half climb over the lathe so it will be getting moved forward and a tool rack added the the splash gaurd

I recently purchased a bigger machine that came with the generic stand and it will be going to scrap as well as i don't like that stand either , basically two rectangular boxes standing on their end joined with a piece of 1.5 - 2mm sheet and the mounting holes that hold it down to the floor are in a pocket so you cant locate the machine then dyna bolt it down , you have to set it up ,mark it , pull it back out ,drill ,set the dyna bolts then lift it into postion and bolt down - way too much work and it is very unstable if not bolted to the floor.

Don't start me off about the stand for my big mill ,once again very flimsy and cost over $200 i could have made a steel one for half that !

All these machines and stands came from the same supplier here in Australia - won't mention who though !

Ian

Some might say you need a steel cabinet firmly bolted to a concrete base on which to fix your lathe but I doubt you'd notice the difference if it was fixed to a wooden one. If it was a high precision instrument lathe then maybe you could justify the effort. If you can make a steel stand for it I'd go that route and leave it on your wooden floor. If at a later date you really think it may benefit from fixing to the concrete you could do this at a later date? I don't have welding equipment so I've made all my benches out of wood and they seem fine. My 8" X 14" Lathe sits on one of them. For info I have a 440kg floor standing mill and at the moment this is just sitting on the wooden floor waiting to be screwed down. It will be interesting to see if I need to go through the floor to the concrete at some point, initial use suggests not.

My lathe is on an old kitchen cabinet, because it was there at the time, it was ok, just. A few weeks later I was given an old door frame, about 4" x 2" and made from teak, so I used that to stiffen everything up - brilliant. I have always prefered wood for benches etc. just feels better. If I had to start again I would use 2"x 2"x 1/4" RSA ,cheaper than hollow section and thick plywood bolted on to form doors etc..

The benches I used at work were powder coated 2" steel square tube frames with 30mm thick ply on top covered in Linoleum. I think I bought them from Kaiserkraft.

I've used wooden frames bolted together with two sheets of 18mm ply screwed together for the top at home. Covered in Lino again as I managed to get some suitable size offcuts.

Make the stand a little higher than you think you need then you can stand on a board, duckboard or pallet to adjust things. That will be easier than lifting and relevelling the lathe if it turns out too low.

Wood probably absorbs some vibration better than steel so boxing in a metal frame or cabinet is probably a good idea.

There have been a few other threads about benches this year so be sure to spend the next few cold wet days systematicly reading all the year's posts. Searching by topic or title seldom brings up the right information as it is sometimes a deviation off another subject.of irrelevant title.

As someone who loves good wood I'd argue that there's nowt wrong with good timber so long as you don't have horrid temp variations and you let it settle where you plan to build for a few weeks.

The trouble with good timber UK is it's extortionate price so realistically one ends up using MDF and or ply - both of which hate damp and MDF of course means wearing a sodding mask while you build with it. You can always strengthen either of them with more timber or bolt on judicious steels if necessary.

I build all the hobby shed cupboards out of MDF for those reasons and originally allowed for a bench lathe in my plan and for some knee space. That section was bridged with a double layer of 25mm MDF glued to itself and supported below with reinforcement..and tested in my usual way by jumping on it with my near 18stone - not a creak

It's a messy pic in my album but you can see that kneehole space wth the vacuum and compressor stuffed there right now. Using a gloss roller gave me a finish that looks sprayed.

If you have huge temp variations then use metal. I'm teaching myself soem welding now.. but metal will also glue and bolt with brackets

Don't ever use MDF it was invented for plumbers who have to knock up an enclosure for water tanks, its only claim to fame is that it paints well, except for the end grain which does not paint at all and needs to be capped. The cheapest sheet material which is any good at all is P5 T & G flooring grade chipboard.. Its green and relative water proof.

I have a wooden stand I made some 30 years ago, its extremely heavy and strong, but its an inconvenient shape so I have been trying to work out what to replace it with. The problem is that the lathe is a Churchill Redman Cub, so its tall with very narrow fixing centre, say 100 lbs mounted on 3" X 4" centres and 50 lbs mounted on two fixings at 4" gap. So you have all the weight on this narrow (4" strip which needs to be cantilevered out to a decent base, say 20" wide.

I have contemplated making an 1" thick ply cabinet, giving say four partitions, but the only way I can think of to spread the weight is to use 2" square box section drilled to take the lathe fixings which then has a bit of angle welded on each end, so it can be rested on then screwed to a 2" X 2" batten screwed and glued to the vertical partitions. My existing stand has a bit 4" X 2" running along the front and back bottom. This I shall do again as it provides a way of moving the stand when loaded, it just complicates the woodwork!

Another thing to think about is, make room for your toes, like the plinths on kitchen units.

Frank

Another afterthought, I extended the 4" X 2"s slightly beyond the sides (1"?) and cut away the under side by 1/2", this was so I could get a crow bar under the frame to lift it prior to inserting rollers.

Frank

Only problem with MDF is the need to watch your lungs. It routers very nicely and if you're after that perfect finish then coat any cross grain with fine filler/ Yes it likes to soak any water up and go nasty and it's a waste of time trying to put fixings into edges but there's enough glues around to bypass that worry (or glue in a rawlplug)

If you want a nice finish with chipboard then you're going to have to glue or iron on a surface or veneer or really go to town with fillers.

..many ways to skin felines they say but much of my career was putting the skin back...