Lathe recommendations for beginner home workshop?

[macardoso]

That's an important point, I've never used one of these things so I'm basing everything on watching a lot of youtubes and reading here on the forums. Gear changing looked like a PITA but maybe I'm overstating the problem. I'm back to thinking something along the lines of the 1228 makes more sense, and if I feel like it's necessary I can hack in an ELS at some later point.

I think if you need to change gears for every different feed rate or thread (as is on the smallest lathes), it will become annoying quickly. I bet this is where the ELS became popular with hobbyists. With a Norton style quick change gearbox, you get all the inch threads and feeds you need without changing any gears. Only when you need a metric thread or strange half size inch thread do you need to change out 2 gears. I do a mix of metric and imperial work and I still only need to change gears a dozen times a year.

 

[ttabbal]

Yeah, if I only had to swap gears for metric/inch, I wouldn't have done the ELS. I do a whole project in one system or the other, so picking one is good enough. It would be rare for me to want to swap in the middle as you are more likely to make mistakes that way. And who wants a part with both metric and inch threads? yuck. I'm just making things for myself, so I can modify the print to match up if I run into something like that.

Machines that require you to swap the whole gear set to change between threads and feeds, basically everything smaller without a full gearbox, take longer to set up the gears than a couple of minutes. I got it down to about 10min if everything goes right. If I try to go faster, I would end up making a mistake and mess up the thread pitch (ALWAYS do an initial scratch pass and check). That doesn't sound like much till you're doing it for the fourth time on a part.

On PM that's everything smaller than a 1236. Other brands are different. I had good luck with using taps most of the time and doing most thread cutting at the end of a part. That doesn't always work though. And sometimes it meant having to dial in a part with the 4 jaw to get the required concentricity. And it's easy for me to overlook dies as mine are garbage HF die-shaped things. Get good ones and they become a good option for smaller sizes.

I've seen a couple of threads now where a hobby user thought the swapping would be fine, and ended up hating it. Others don't seem to mind. At the end of the day, everyone just has to decide for themselves what works for them. That can be difficult at the beginning when you don't know what you don't know. And it's easy for us to spend your money!

 

[martik777]

A good workaround to changing gears for different feed rates is to attach a variable speed motor to your leadscrew usually on the tail end. Then you can totally disengage the gear train

 

[svideo]

One issue with doing metric threads on lathes with imperial leadscrews is for the most part the half-nut needs to remain engaged through the threading process. I do quite a bit of metric threading, so I use a proximity stop system which stops the lathe at the same position when repeating the thread. I thread at 250-450+ RPM and just not quick enough to do it otherwise. My current lathe has a universal gearbox so no change gears for metric, although I had the PM-1340GT previously and made due with the manual gearbox change gears for metric. Quite a few of the metric threads are handled by the same gear set, so not that big a deal if you are not threading frequently. When doing imperial threading there are no change gears.

ERL1340 Thread Cutting with a Proximity Stop System

I often get questions on thread cutting using a proximity stop system, recently I had to make several threaded micrometer shafts out of O1 steel, all with the same dimensions and thread tolerances. I do not have any fancy camera holders or editing software, so just propped the camera on the head...

www.hobby-machinist.com

This post was confusing as heck to me, so I started digging into the issue and I think I have a much better understanding of the problem thanks to this video and then your solution utilizing an inductive prox sensor. I just wanted to say that is a pretty damn interesting setup and I'll probably be bugging you sometime later about doing the same. Thanks for all of this, it's great input!