Show us your lathe!

All discussion about lathes including but not limited to: South Bend, Hardinge, Logan, Monarch, Clausing and other HSM lathes, including imports

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Bill Shields
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by Bill Shields »

You are assuming that the frame will not flex or vibrate...which may not be a totally accurate assumption.

Were it me I would put down some 2x8 heavy wood boards under your top layer of whatever if a big chunk of steel not in the $...but then at today's $ the wood may be $.

I have an inherited 1950 vintage SB sitting on a similar frame to yours, the top of which is 2x8 oak boards with a metal chip pan that can be pulled out and dumped.

Boards are either varnished or shellac covered...or maybe linseed oil..creator died 10 years ago so I cannot ask him.

Works just fine and vibrates very little. The extra weight of the wood helps a lot to lower the resonant frequency.

Actually...some of these glued up hardwood stair treads from home Depot or Lowe's may make a good base.

Or a glue up IKEA hardwood table top
Too many things going on to bother listing them.
pat1027
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by pat1027 »

ao1 wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 2:13 pm Wanting to purchase a steel plate for top, but as I stated, with the prices of steel I will have to wait on that. For now the top will be made of two pieces of 3/4" plywood glued together. I may place sheet steel on top. Still debating on that.
It doesn't look like you are installing a big machine. A heavy flat plate is being worked in it's weakest direction so other than gaining mass it's a poor use of steel weight. With a minimal amount of steel you could also stiffen your stand. Replace your leveling bolts with shims and anchor it to the floor.
theradioshop
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by theradioshop »

New here. Been using a Harbor freight lathe for 2 years. Made several mods and extended the bed. For a small lathe it does pretty good for what I use it for. Mostly making small parts for vintage radios and various other things.

Just this past week end I finally found a full size lathe. A McCabe model 4014 per the tag. The picture is from the listing. I disassembled the lathe and loaded it up to take it home. This is an old one from the early 1900's. Was sitting in this spot for 65 years covered in grease. The lathe is fully functional and came with several boxes of accessories including HSS, lantern tool holders, all the change gears, and a 10 inch back plate. This lathe has a power cross feed! However there is not much information on line. Would love to find a manual but will have to go at it alone.

Going to start the restoration this week and will photograph the process as well is record for YouTube.
Next is the put it back together in its new home and then start the restore.
Attachments
HF lathe.PNG
McCabe 4041.PNG
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bulgie
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by bulgie »

Here's my '82 Enco 10x24, model 92010 (Taiwan)
shelf now with more stainless!.jpg
One owner before me, a hobbyist, deceased so I can't ask him questions. He seems to have been fair-to-middlin' about cleaning and oiling it. Though it was very grimy when I got it, everything was oiled and wear seems to be minimal.

I paid $1500, which I know is no great bargain, but I'd been looking for almost 2 years. Pickins are slim here (Seattle) at least for my requirements. It came well tooled up, including a real Aloris QCTP with 8 holders, the usual 2 chucks, faceplate, steady, live/dead centers etc, but also a 5C collet adapter with drawbar and some collets. The spindle bore is 1-3/8", unusually large for such a small lathe. (That was my main requirement, the spindle that can take 5C collets, together with small overall size, which made my search so prolonged.) I have the metric change gears, original sales receipt, parts list and user's manual.

I put it on a workbench with a 1" plywood top (single layer) set on a frame made of 1-1/2" plumbing pipe and threaded joints, not the best bench I know! When I ran it, I noticed some shake, so I added a horizontal strut to the wall behind it.
stiffener.jpg
Then I put a plywood shelf over the stiffener, and covered it in thin stainless sheet to make it easier to sweep off chips, reduce the wood splinters under my fingernails, and to look cool, very important. Online metals had a special price on this SS sheet, maybe they still do.

What do you all think about the stiffener, bad idea? It did reduce the shake by a lot and now my ability to take deep cuts seems more limited by horsepower than vibration. Most recent part I made started with 3" 1018 which I had to turn down to 3/4" at one end, lots of chips. I settled on .040" depth of cut, kind of wimpy I know, but deeper roughing cuts were bogging down the motor.

Oh yeah the motor. It came with 1 hp single phase, which I replaced with 1.5 hp 3 ph and a VFD. I added a cheap tachometer to the front of the VFD, the kind with a Hall sensor and a magnet stuck to the spindle. Lovin' the VFD, much reducing the need to change belts for speed adjustment.

The whole boring story in pictures of dragging it home, getting it into the basement etc. is here https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWBCjtN for anyone interested. I mostly documented it for myself, because that was a fun time for me. Though I used lathes at work, this is my first time buying, transporting and setting one up. Oh someone might benefit from seeing how to add a tachometer to this KB brand VFD, it came out nice.

What I will use it for mostly is building custom bicycle frames, which I did for a living for over 20 years but now I will do as a hobby in retirement, Universe willin' and the Creek don't rise... My first few lathe projects have been making fixtures for the bike frames thing. Here's a Flickr album about attaching my bike frame tacking jig to the wall of my shed, what that 3" diameter turned part was for: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzH1Ax Next up is making better flanges for my cheap bench grinder to reduce the runout of the rocks.

Mark B in Seattle
John Evans
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by John Evans »

Try with the VFD at 60H and the belt on the slowest driect drive. .040 is still .080 on the dia. And what tooling were you using? If negitive rake carbide that could be part of the issue,takes HP for heavier cuts. Also what was your feed rate ? Fast feed and deeper depth takes HP and torque !! Cutting Hertz to slow speed works against both.
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bulgie
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by bulgie »

Thanks for that John. Yes .080 on the diam. Should I be expecting more from this little guy? I am pretty much self-taught and also rusty, my metal fab career ended 25 yerars ago, hadn't touched a lathe in this millennium until I got this one. And I never was very scientific about speeds and feeds, I always just tried stuff, did everything by feel. Pre-internet, and I didn't know any real machinists to ask.

I still don't know how to tell what my feed rate is! (Anyone got a primer on that?) I set the gearbox to what would have been 24 tpi, if I had been using the lead screw, but of course I switched it to the feed rod. So what does that give me for feed? Different for each lathe design I imagine, unless feed rod and lead screw both advance the carriage the same amount for the same gears? I know I could find out, with an indicator, actually measure the feed, but too lazy so far.

Yes I was using the belts to get my speed with the VFD at 60-ish. I think I've been told that HP falls off both above and below the nameplate freq, is that right? I was at about 180 rpm for most of it, faster as the diameter got smaller. Using a brazed carbide tool with positive rake but not much. Chips were breaking nicely, mostly dark straw shading into blue some of the time. Finish cut was faster rpm, slower feed, gave a decent finish, better than I expected in 1018 actually.

The part needed a kinda deep internal 3/4" thread on the big end, which was scary for me but it came out excellent. I assume I cannot ever thread in reverse, due to my threaded spindle nose, correct? Well, if I could hold the part in a collet I could, but not in the 3-jaw. So I was threading toward the shoulder and using every bit of the length of my internal threading tool, risking a crash on every pass. Keeps you on your toes!

After I burn through these brazed-carbide tools that came with the lathe (good quality Kennametal), I will probably use more HSS, but I haven't dialed in my bench grinder yet. The tool I made with the factory-supplied Chinese wheels didn't come out great, I saw the edge get red hot briefly just right at the edge, which I assume means I've taken the hardness out of it. I have ordered new Norton AO wheels in J hardness which I gather is good for 3600 rpm 6" diameter, correct me if that's all wrong. Only $19 each here https://www.sharpeningsupplies.com/Nort ... 38C20.aspx so not much $$ wasted if those are not good wheels.

Mark
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Bill Shields
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by Bill Shields »

I have one of those lathes (40 years) and have only been able to use carbide on iron castings..otherwise it is just not rigid enough for carbide otherwise.

Everyone seems to forget (or) ignore the fact that pulleys do more than change speed...they are also torque multipliers.

Slow speed in a VFD motor that gives full horsepower does not make up for the torque multiplication of the belt step down...

Your back brace is a good idea. By lathe had the same problem and I did something similar to solve the same problem.
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John Evans
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by John Evans »

Most of those lathes the thread plate also shows the feed in small numbers for when those settings are used with the feed rod.
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bulgie
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by bulgie »

Bill Shields wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 7:52 pm Your back brace is a good idea. By lathe had the same problem and I did something similar to solve the same problem.
Thanks Bill! I will be able to rest easy now I've gotten your OK on that. Sounds sarcastic but I am 100% sincere! I haven't been here long, but long enough to know that you're one of the smart guys. I'm glad you still like answering questions for FNG's.

To anyone with this lathe — or one of the many identical lathes under different names — if interested, that brace was super easy. I took out the existing unthreaded pin, which is 3/4", and replaced it with a shoulder bolt (aka stripper bolt) with 3/4" shank and 5/8" thread. A standard-length bolt fit perfectly (sorry I don't remember the length, just measure yours). The 5/8" nut tightens down against the shoulder, so you can drive it home tight and it doesn't bind the action of the lever that loosens the belts. Worked perfectly by sheer luck, with the nominal 3/16" thick hot-rolled angle, it tightens right to where there's no slop or friction worth speaking of in the action. It's not a real critical application, a little slop or friction would be fine, but I'll settle for perfection.

That bolt goes thru a thick part of the headstock casting, so it seemed to me to be a good place to brace the whole machine.

Mark
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Bill Shields
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by Bill Shields »

The major problem that I have with the lathe is that the cross compound is soft...put acarbide cutter in it and take a heavy cut and things that to move vertically, cracking tools.

Yes the gibs are tight...but the compound dovetail is just a crappy fit job.

Not to say yours will be the same way...but mine (and others I have spoken with over the years) have had similar problems.

I still use the lathe, but not for precision or heavy cuts.
Too many things going on to bother listing them.
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bulgie
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by bulgie »

John Evans wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 8:20 pm Most of those lathes the thread plate also shows the feed in small numbers for when those settings are used with the feed rod.
John, that had me rushing downstairs to see if I could have missed something so obvious. But no, my plate doesn't have that info.

I should have known to RTFM though — the info is in a chart in the manual. Annoyingly, there are 4 different charts, I guess because this manual covers 4 lathe models, and the description for which chart to use is a bit ambiguous. But I measured the actual feed just now, for the A-1 gear, and it matched up with the chart that I kinda-sorta thought probably was mine, so that's confirmed — it's this one:
Feeds (Longitudinal).jpg
I printed that out and hung it on the wall near the lathe, so I won't sound so ignorant next time someone asks me what feed I was using.

Thanks for the kick in the butt I needed to get that done.

Mark
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Steggy
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Re: Show us your lathe!

Post by Steggy »

bulgie wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 3:53 pmHere's my '82 Enco 10x24, model 92010 (Taiwan)...When I ran it, I noticed some shake, so I added a horizontal strut to the wall behind it.

Some of that shaking is sloppiness in the motor mount. I have a 12" × 36" JET lathe, whose power transmission setup is very similar to yours. After changing the belt tensioning setup to get rid of slop, I got a smooth-running machine.

Something else to check is the cone sheave on the jackshaft behind the head stock. The bore may be eccentric to the pulley grooves. The fix for that would be to have someone with a larger and more powerful lathe bore and sleeve the sheave to get concentricity. Also, examine the belt. Asian V-belts are not the best...

What do you all think about the stiffener, bad idea?

It shouldn’t be necessary if all parts of the power transmission setup are tight.

Oh yeah the motor. It came with 1 hp single phase, which I replaced with 1.5 hp 3 ph and a VFD.

If your VFD is attached to single-phase power, odds are you won't get rated horsepower from your motor. Also, did you use an inverter-rated motor? Conventional motors tend to overheat when run at a slow pace and don't tolerate the hash and spikes emitted by many VFD units, although the KB unit you have is better than average in that regard.
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