Home Built Lathe 1 micron tolerance

Pretty cool...
 
I never get tired of listening to this man.
 
I watched this a year or so ago. He is making the point about air bearings being the most accurate we have today.
I don't think I need that level of accuracy.
 
I too tend to watch his videos every year since I first stumbled upon him. Fantastic series of videos. Dan Gelbart is brilliant.....just brilliant.
 
I rarely need better than +/- 3 microns myself. And that's only for an occasional custom made tactical claw hammer. ;)

Tom
Hey, if you are able to pawn off products that are 3 microns off target dimension you are selling claw hammers to the wrong market. Try that sloppy work with a toilet seat for an Air Force contract and you'll end up in the crapper.

On a serious note: I wonder how many do work in the .0001 tolerances. Hard for me to imagine that at this point though I have specified work to a few tenths or about 12 microns tolerance on one occasion. A screw type oil pump on a nuclear submarine. That was before we did QC on parts from OEM product and found they were .003 out of their published tolerances. My specs relaxed after that because theirs was a service proven product.
 
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We had a +.0002"/-.0001" spec on a plastic (PEEK) part that was made for us by a Sunnyvale CA job shop. He was able to hold that spec consistantly on the tens of thousands of parts made. Parts were made on a Swiss screw machine. I personally ranked the shop as the best I had ever worked with.
 
I used to work with +/- .002mm tolerances when building spindles for Yamazaki/Mazak. This was only for surface grinding the bearing spacers, to create bearing press. Very cool lathe.
 
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