Power feeding on the lathe

Hi

I have used my lathe before for threading by adding the correct drive wheels and engaging the half nut.

I was wondering if it was possible to fit the drive wheels in such a way to just give you a constant slow feed for facing cuts.

Hope this makes sense.

Very useful, gives a nice finish

set your changewheels for 100+ TPI kind of thing, experiment on a bit of scrap

use your tailstock centre for best results

Edited By Ady1 on 14/12/2020 00:31:38

The answer for most lathes is yes. Some have a selector for fast and slow travel, it depends on the lathe and its features. If you identify which lathe you have you will get a more accurate answer.

Martin C

Assuming you still have the same lathe as the one in your album, isn't that the second photo tpi2 ??

Bill

Did you mean facing, ie the end of the stock, or turning the outside parallel?

As Peak says if you still have the lathe in the photos set up the gears as per the top chart for feeds, I'd try the 0.089mm/rev first

.

I’ve had two lathes from the same manufacturer. One faced ridiculously slowly at best, while the current one faces at a much better rate. I have a QCGB, so changing from long travel to cross travel with sensible feed rates is easy enough, but with the earlier lathe I almost always fed manually because of the slow feed at the fastest setting.

The one in the photo does not have power X-feed so just set it up for what turning feed rate you want and face by hand.

Thats the good thing about the 250-280-290, the front lever gives you 3 rates of shaft rotation which equates to two facing and two turning without having to change the gear train.

Yes, I still have the same lathe as the one pictured.

I was wanting it set up to turn the outside parallel and hopefully get a better finish. I would face off by hand.

Just set it up as per my post earlier using the top chart on the front of the lathe

Ok I will try setting it up as you suggest.

You have to have a lathe with a feed to the cross slide, not all do.

For finish turning, the feed rate / rev needs to be as small as possible.

Think of it as for cutting a screw thread with the finest possible pitch. So the 0.089 mm /rev will give a feed rate of 0.00352 / rev in Imperial units, equating to a little over 285 tpi.

A carbide tip may not like such a fine feed combined with a shallow depth of cut. A HSS tool, especially with a small radius should produce a good finish.

HTH

Howard

Should not be a problem for carbide, I usually use 0.0025" for finishing and get a good cut down to 0.001" DOC

For fine cuts down to 0.0005" for finishing, get the inserts intended for aluminium, they work well on steel and stainless steel,

If you don't have a cross feed setting you can use an electric screwdriver or drill with a suitable adaptor, eg a tuning fork shape to engage a ball handle, or perhaps a socket to engage the nut on a round handle.
If using HSS using a rounded tip witll grive a better ninish on the final cut, or a small flat on the end of the tool so that you are not making a fine screw thread.

Thanks for the replies.

All the time I have had this lathe and it never dawned on me up till now that the numbers of the change wheels in the top set of figures are for cutting speeds. What a numpty I am.