How to Build small Home Made Lathe

ericc said:
Hi. I thought about building my own lathe. Someone on the Internet told me to buy a beat up old lathe and fix it instead. This should be a lot quicker. So far, I've been into it for a few years. Progress is slow, but probably would have been slower if I had started on my own. The Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once said that students spend too much time reading papers trying to figure them out. Instead, they should just look at the results and simply calculate them without getting confused by what's in the middle. But, maybe that is like a Silicon Valley mom exhorting her kids to drop out and be like Bill Gates.
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I'd think the worst worn out lathe you could find would be better than the project on the video.
 
benmychree said:
oskar said:
Sorry benmychree, I forgot about your post. I will be very interested to see the pictures of your build
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My patterns are at the foundry now, I expect to see the castings soon and will get started before long; the headstock is ball bearing equipped, and has a tie bar over the top of the cone pulley to give it more stiffness in adjusting the angular contact bearings; the pulleys are cast iron and were made originally for a Paragon hand screw machine that was made during WW 2 by the Frieden Calculator Co. of San Francisco. The back end of the spindle is threaded for faceplate work, there will be a countershaft behind the spindle and a two step pulley on it and the motor for a high and low speed range, those parts are already made; I made a headstock without the tie bar (like an old Hendy lathe) but there was the bearing adjustment problem, so I modified the pattern for this job. I had made the headstock for a Oliver patternmaker's lathe that was missing the headstock, I later found a headstock on e bay for it. The tailstock will be non cross sliding. I have not decided if I am going to make the tool rest assembly, I may just use Delta items.
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A lathe is the most basic tool to start to build any other tool. How will you make the spindle or any other of the shafts in the lathe?
How will you machine the pulleys? Not saying it is impossible, just very curious.


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See HLaps1990 on youtube. He has a very detailed build series.
 
A fellow Canadian, Matthias Wandel likes to build machines using wood. He has a video on building his lathe.

Matthias Wandel wood lathe build video

A US fellow, Jeremy Fielding also like to build machines using wood. His video on building his lathe.

Jeremy Fielding wood lathe build video

As others have mentioned, starting with a crappy wood lathe like the Craftsman monotube may be faster. There is a lot which you can do to improve a monotube lathe.
 
You might look at the "Shopsmith" multi-purpose woodworking machine to get some ideas.
They also come up for sale quite often at very affordable prices
Mark
 
Make yourself a Pole Lathe, it's the only wood construction lathe that's worth building.
 
neshkoro said:
A lathe is the most basic tool to start to build any other tool. How will you make the spindle or any other of the shafts in the lathe?
How will you machine the pulleys? Not saying it is impossible, just very curious.


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The spindle is already made, as well as all the other bits and pieces of the headstock, except the main casting, which is at the foundry, which as I previously said is a modified version of the one that I originally made, which was too flexible to keep the bearings in correct adjustment. To answer specific questions, the spindle looks like a spindle should look, it is steel, is drilled and bored hollow and is threaded on both ends for chucks and faceplates (left and right handed threads) and also threaded for the bearing adjustment collar, the pair of pulleys were already machined and are cast iron, they came with a small turret lathe (hand screw machine) that I had and used a Reeves drive on instead, so I had the left over. the other pulleys for the motor and countershaft (with two steps, I made of aluminum plate. If you look at my list of equipment, you will see that I do not lack for much of anything to accomplish the task, and I am still able to use the equipment at my business that I sold when I retired about seven years ago.
 
I got The Metal Lathe book by Gingery but I’m afraid I’m not equipped for castings neither working on steel. The book gave me a good insight about lathes and terminology and I’m happy I got it.

I’m working on the design of my new small lathe and I plan to make a model out of MDF on what I will build out of aluminum. After the model is complete then I will cut the aluminum pieces according to the MDF model. That’s the plan but I have some questions:

I discover in my storage that I have a Taig 200-60 ER16 spindle along with a Serline VS motor (90VDC, 1.85A) including the pulleys, brackets and a set of ER16 collets from 1/32” to 3/8”. I plan to use this spindle and propably buy a Face Plate to get going at first. I don’t know how the Face Plate will mount into the spindle and I wonder if anyone here knows about it.

I think I will build a cnc lathe and I wonder what size slide rails / ballscrews are normally used in small lathes. On the cnc router I built shown in my first post the slide rails and ball screws are 16mm diameter. Is that too big? I can get the slide rails in 12mm diameter but the smallest diameter for the screws is 16mm.
 
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