Lathe/Milling Machine combination

Pretty good value.

I have always received good service from Warco and would recommend them.

The lathe has a good capacity and is capable of turning large work-pieces. The large spindle bore (25mm) is very handy.

The machine comes with a good range of accessories - faceplate, 3-jaw chuck, change wheels, fixed and travelling steady, centres - although a 4-jaw chuck is the first thing you will want.

The machine is built to reasonable accuracy. It is possible to work to a tolerance of +/-0.02mm without too much difficulty.

The gap between the milling head spindle and the cross slide is very large, even with the spindle fully extended. Unless you are using a very tall workpiece, some sort of raising block will be needed, which largely defeats having such a large machine table. This is a very frustrating feature and required extra equipment and much time to set up, and significantly reduces the functionality and usefulness of the milling/drilling fixture.

The machine is very noisy. The pulley bearings are rough and noisy, particularly in the milling head.

The need to change belts to adjust spindle speed is time consuming and frustrating.

Changing the gear-cutting gears is very time-consuming - the gears are very stiff on their shafts and are extremely difficult to remove. Brute force is often required. Because of this, I seldom resort to screw-cutting or using the power carriage feed. It just takes too long to set up.

Between-centres turning is all but impossible. The width of the milling table severely limits the movement of the carriage in the X direction (along the lathe bed). This means that if the cutting tool is set up to cut the left hand end of the work-piece, you cannot reach the right-hand end and vice versa. This is compounded by the fact that the carriage is prevented from traversing fully to the left by a lathe holding-down bolt, and the lack of significant overhang of the tailstock. Because of this, it is not possible to turn a constant-diameter (or tapered) shaft in one pass. This is a huge limitation.

The lack of tailstock overhang is a problem, which is compounded by the width of the milling table. In addition to the between centres problems (above), the tailstock has insufficient reach to allow drilling of a workpiece held in the chuck. This is compounded when the workpiece is short and a small drill or centre drill is used. I have got around this by using a MT3-MT3 extension sleeve but this does not resolve the between-centres problems - it also compounds the inaccuracy of the tailstock alignment and results in reduced rigidity.

There is some play in the carriage movement. I cannot remove this without over-tightening the gib-strips. This means that with the cutting tool mounted on the left of the cross-slide (as it must be) the tool cuts deeper when traversing the carriage from right to left (and vice versa). The effect is reversed for boring operations. This is not a big problem, but is an annoying niggle.

The 4-way tool post is a useful feature. However, it is not good quality, and repeatability of positioning is poor. For reasonably accurate work, it is necessary to re-measure the depth of cut each time the tool post is rotated. This makes production work unnecessarily time consuming.

Hi Geoff:

I "designed" my own .

That one is about 3.5 " dia. Its only a shouldered collar with a thingy (been so long since I had it off!) in the middle to fit the end of the Myford feedscrew. Then there is a retaining plate on the outer.

Edited By meyrick griffith-jones on 19/12/2009 22:04:35

Hi Meyrick:

I do like the big dials on your Super 7 - they would save me a lot of squinting through my reading specs at tiny figures and graduations! Some years ago I had to take some photographs for a book, using the ML7R I had at the time. The figures and graduations on the top slide and cross slide  were raised rather than engraved, and almost invisible on black and white prints. Answer was to spray the dials matt black, then spin them in the chuck against a bit of fine wet-and-dry. The result was bright silver figures against a black background - perfect for the photos, and much easier on the eye for subsequent work.

As I remember, I gave the same treatment to the leadscrew handwheel but, with the figures and graduations indented rather than raised, the result was black markings against a bright background.