The Home Machinist!

There's tons of personal websites and threads on almost every machining forum out there with information and upgrades done to your exact lathe. Try using a variety of search terms since a single one may not bring all of them up. I can't even estimate the number of threads I've read on those forums o...

If I were you I'd become a member over on the Practical Machinist forums. Then hit there South Bend specific sub forum. There's more than enough there to keep you going for a very long time. Also some unbelievable and "proper" restorations that involve a lot more than nice paint. There's a...

I've handloaded a hell of a lot of ammunition in various caliber's, and as Webb has already mentioned, you need to be real careful with what your doing. If the manufacturer won't replace that die, then I'd want to do a proper chamber cast of it, and I'd only use the proper and recognised as correct ...

Wish I had that much room, and even more so I sure wish my shop had that concrete floor.

I don't think I'm quite as old as Bill, so I'm not old.

Pete

OK, EOsteam, here's a few numbers you might want to keep handy as a reference. There's 3600 seconds per degree. To get one minute of angle on a 5" sine bar takes a stack height of .00145" divide that by 60 to give you the stack height per second, it gives you .0000241 of height required fo...

With the almost standard use of DRO's today, and then CNC becoming much more common even in one man shops, I'd guess there's a lot less lay out's being done now. At the normal hourly shop rate a complicated lay out could get quite expensive real fast. Cad and CAM are the lay out's today at least for...

If your lathe has a excessively high bottom speed, then building what's called a mandrel handle works really well. It locks into the rear of the lathes spindle using a slotted female taper that's just barely under the spindles bore size, and a male taper that gets pulled into the female taper with a...

Yep John's totally right. Usual shrink fits are about .001 per inch of diameter if I'm remembering the numbers correctly. So .002 under on the hole might just be possible. But it shouldn't be all that tough to dig up the expansion ratio for about any type of metal per degree of heat or cold below or...

You can take this for what it's worth. I owned a mini mill or an X2 sized mill as there commonly known as. One issue with that belt drive is you lose the lower speeds and the torque that the 2 spd geared head give's. My thought is a set of metal gears to replace the plastic OEM one's would be far be...

With a poorly built offshore mill, or even a dirt cheap drawbar then maybe the drawbar's metallurgy,heat treatment or the lack of even having any, and just how sloppy and undersize the threads were cut or rolled may give reason to be concerned about putting some real torque on the drawbar with those...

Yep your both 100% correct. And not only is there all those obsolete frame sizes and equipment specific motors and frames. But today there's at least 3 recognised yet different frame and motor standards in common use. There's both imperial and metric, and then the Chinese and possibly along with Tai...

It ISN'T fun or even at all smart to operate machine tools by the trial and error method. That's a real fast way to get yourself hurt. And forget buying the video's for now. Start doing it the right way and buying some reference books. Despite it's title, buy George H. Thomas's "The Model Engin...