[How-To] Mounting a medium lathe on top of a rolling tool chest?????

I agree for your lighter weight lathe David Best's ultra fine stand is probably a lot of work. Mine too. Our lathes are just a lot bigger. However, I just noticed you are not alone/first in your quest. Why not ask @6String1 what he settled on and if he is happly with his decision. He was looking a year back or so.


Some of the tool chests with wheels could have bolts added for leveling feet and to get them off the wheels.

Good luck.
 
How do these do? Anyone tried something similar?


Casters Set
I have those on some woodworking machines. They work, but are difficult to adjust from foot-down to caster-down. And if the floor isn't dead flat and smooth, it's very difficult to push the machine around. Since I have a pallet jack in the shop anyway, I much prefer using it.
 
More... google this phrase and see the images: " pm1228vf-lb on a tool chest site:www.hobby-machinist.com "

@Franko also did this. AND did he used those funny looking casters that @Christianstark mentioned above.

Anyway, there are several pictures you might fine useful to find other links.
 
Hi Dave, My 4 inch steel casters on my PM1440GT push around pretty easy. They may be more like your pallet jack casters for pushing? Anyway, in my case there would be just enough room for a pallet jack to fit in my room in front of the lathe if I remove some stuff but not enough to move room to pull the lathe out and then remove the pallet jack.

I looked at your pictures.... so clean..and neat. Envy! I also see wooden stairs, is your shop in a basement? Walkout? What I am really curious about is the flooring. It appears to have a strange texture... is this tile, concrete, paint? I have a bare concrete floor in a 1930 house walkout basement. The floor slopes downward over an inch from the spindle casters to the tail stock casters! It seems it was poured like this so the water can drain to a floor drain when water leaks in at a wall! Does not happen often, but sometimes I see a little, very slow, stream after a very hard rain or wet season. So it actually is sometimes, but rarely, wet under the lathe! Not good, but is what I have to work with. The concrete sits on clay, but is quite strong and has very few cracks in it. The clay probably gets wet and shifts around a bit under the concrete. Initially I worried a bit about the machinery weight on the clay, but then the whole house of brick, block, stone, and a big slate roof sits on the same clay, but with footers. I have thought about painting the floor with epoxy, but that would require I get everything out so that the floor could be sanded really clean and roughened up. Maybe in the next life time.

Dave L.
 
Hi Dave, My 4 inch steel casters on my PM1440GT push around pretty easy. They may be more like your pallet jack casters for pushing? Anyway, in my case there would be just enough room for a pallet jack to fit in my room in front of the lathe if I remove some stuff but not enough to move room to pull the lathe out and then remove the pallet jack.

I looked at your pictures.... so clean..and neat. Envy! I also see wooden stairs, is your shop in a basement? Walkout? What I am really curious about is the flooring. It appears to have a strange texture... is this tile, concrete, paint? I have a bare concrete floor in a 1930 house walkout basement. The floor slopes downward over an inch from the spindle casters to the tail stock casters! It seems it was poured like this so the water can drain to a floor drain when water leaks in at a wall! Does not happen often, but sometimes I see a little, very slow, stream after a very hard rain or wet season. So it actually is sometimes, but rarely, wet under the lathe! Not good, but is what I have to work with. The concrete sits on clay, but is quite strong and has very few cracks in it. The clay probably gets wet and shifts around a bit under the concrete. Initially I worried a bit about the machinery weight on the clay, but then the whole house of brick, block, stone, and a big slate roof sits on the same clay, but with footers. I have thought about painting the floor with epoxy, but that would require I get everything out so that the floor could be sanded really clean and roughened up. Maybe in the next life time.

Dave L.
It's David ---- Dave is my father.

Sorry to the OP for hijacking his thread. But here goes.

Yes, my pallet jack casters are about 3.5" diameter, but what really matters for roll-ability is the hardness AND their width. I've experimented with lots of casters - everything in my shop is movable in some manner, whether it's by a caster on the machine/tool-chest or via the pallet jack. So I've experimented with lots of caster types. For something 2,000 pounds, the caster needs to be be as wide as it is tall - that's the issue with the Carrymaster locking casters/leveling feet. They can certainly take the rated weights, but they are difficult to wheel around because the caster element is so narrow.

As for my shop, you can take the full tour here. I did several things to this basement when I bought the house 10 years ago. First, I added a separate entrance for egress of equipment and supplies. I build custom kitchens and needed an ongoing way to move flats of plywood into the basement and get finished cabinets out. Obviously I also needed a way to get heavy equipment into and out of the shop as well. So I cut a hole in one of the shop walls that's about 6-feet wide and built a separate entrance. It's essentially a concrete box on the exterior of the shop with a bulkhead door - similar to what they'd call a "storm" entrance to a basement back east, except it has no stairs. You can see that in this photo lowering my PM-935 into the basement, and is discussed a bit more in the first two minutes of this video:

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There's a whole series of photos that explain how I got my PM-1340GT into the basement working alone here. And you can see what move-in day was like when I unloaded an entire 48-foot flatbed and moved into the shop originally here.

My basement floor has an 11-inch difference in height from one corner to the opposite corner, so the floor had to be leveled. I didn't think about this until all my woodworking equipment was in the basement, but I decided it had to be level, and I didn't want to be standing on concrete for lengthy periods anyway.

As you will see in the photos at that last link, the floor in my shop is 1-1/8" T&G commercial-grade plywood (the same stuff used in high-rise construction as form material for concrete slab floors). I put down pressure-treated stringers, each cut and profiled to yield the exact same distance from the top of the stringer to the bottom of the floor joists above (which are level). Cutting the stringers was the most labor intensive part of the job. The stringers were put down 16-inches on center bedded in construction adhesive using a Ramgun and explosive nails into the concrete floor. Over the stringers is an oil-impregnated felt as a vapor barrier, then the T&G plywood went down over that and nailed in place with 8d galvanized.

The finished floor left me with 84" of headroom AFF to the joist bottoms above. This headroom limited my choice of mills to the PM-935 (I would have prefered a Haas VM-2). This photo was taken in the process of the floor installation to give you an idea. Since my equipment was already in the basement, this new floor was done in sections 1/3rd at a time, repositioning equipment as I went.

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Once installed, the plywood floor was painted - two epoxy primer coats, then 3 polyurethane porch paint applications. The paint has held up well, but with glue drips from the woodworking activities and the stains from welding and machining, was looking pretty tired after 10 years. Plus the mill swarf under my feet while milling did a number on the floor in that area until I invested in floor mats. So during the Covid-lockdown, I sanded down the floor using a hand-held 4" wide belt sander (talk about back killer), moving every machine in the shop at least two times, and mopped down two fresh coats of the polyurethane porch paint. At 72 years, this was not my idea of fun, but I'm glad I did it.

IMG_5080 (2).jpeg


My mill and the lathe are both sitting on aluminum riser-blocks that I machined specifically to fit in 4" holes in the plywood floor and are epoxied to the concrete slab below - these riser-blocks give me a solid platform at the four corners to level the machines and have them solidly connected to the concrete floor.

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There's tons of more detail on my Flickr blog here.
 
David, you're a master! ...i'm 66 and shudder at the thought of doing anything like that! :D
 
Wow, David. Explanation much appreciated. I am in Awl at all the work you have done to make this great shop.

It never occurred to me to make a "strong" wooden floor. I no longer have the energy for such an undertaking! Also, since my ceiling is not as high as your original height and the slope on my floor is not as bad as yours I never contemplated doing so much work to correct my floor slope.

In someways. Your design is sort of like many integrated circuit clean rooms. They too have a false floor, but in stead of plywood they have a floor of metal grills. The heavy equipment is supported through these some what as you have done. The clean room air circulates downward from thick HEPA filters in the ceiling with laminar flow to the floor through the grills and then is passes along the real floor back to the outside walls to be sent back up to the ceiling filters. For us that would be the ultimate in removing the machining dust, oils, smells, etc. In these clean room they take the operation off line every so often (~once a year) to clean everything, but most importantly all the stuff that fell through the grills to the real floor. They can lift out the grills. This also gives them an opportunity to install any equipment or upgrades. With continuous re-circulation through the HEPA filters the air just gets cleaner and cleaner. As the HEPA filters get dirty they pass less air but they actually do a better job cleaning as they can only pass smaller and smaller particles. You could almost do something like this to ventilate your shop via the floor, but from your tour link it looks like you have already taken care of everything!!! By the way, "packed" is an understatement but so well organized! ... Well I guess you still have some hidden space under the floor for more tools and supplies ... trap doors...

Anyway, than you again for the info.
 
Wow, David. Explanation much appreciated. I am in Awl at all the work you have done to make this great shop.

It never occurred to me to make a "strong" wooden floor. I no longer have the energy for such an undertaking! Also, since my ceiling is not as high as your original height and the slope on my floor is not as bad as yours I never contemplated doing so much work to correct my floor slope.

In someways. Your design is sort of like many integrated circuit clean rooms. They too have a false floor, but in stead of plywood they have a floor of metal grills. The heavy equipment is supported through these some what as you have done. The clean room air circulates downward from thick HEPA filters in the ceiling with laminar flow to the floor through the grills and then is passes along the real floor back to the outside walls to be sent back up to the ceiling filters. For us that would be the ultimate in removing the machining dust, oils, smells, etc. In these clean room they take the operation off line every so often (~once a year) to clean everything, but most importantly all the stuff that fell through the grills to the real floor. They can lift out the grills. This also gives them an opportunity to install any equipment or upgrades. With continuous re-circulation through the HEPA filters the air just gets cleaner and cleaner. As the HEPA filters get dirty they pass less air but they actually do a better job cleaning as they can only pass smaller and smaller particles. You could almost do something like this to ventilate your shop via the floor, but from your tour link it looks like you have already taken care of everything!!! By the way, "packed" is an understatement but so well organized! ... Well I guess you still have some hidden space under the floor for more tools and supplies ... trap doors...

Anyway, than you again for the info.
I was once an executive at Intel and conducted Mr. Clean evaluations of the FABs monthly, so I know well the flooring your pointing out. In my case, the analysis suggested it was cheaper to have my housekeeper do the floors in the shop every week. LOL.
 
I guess I am in awe not awl! Anyway, I desperately need to borrow your housekeeper for both cleaning and more importantly for the organizational skills!

By the way, it seems strange to me that for a former Intel guy I did not see an electronics shop or instruments in your tour?!

I am fortunate, we have a large house with walk out basement ..... that I share with my wife. The 1930 house had some rooms built long before my arrival. So one of these is just for electronics building and experiments, one is just for the metal working (I tried to keep all of the oily stuff in a separate space, but it is not large enough. It contains: PM940M-CNC, PM1440GT, a floor Craftsman drill press, and 1970s SB Heavy 10), one area is just for optical experiments and equipment, one is just for paints, electrical parts storage etc, another is for misc storage, and lastly there is a larger room where hand tools, wood working equipment, hard woods, pipes, etc. etc. are stored. Virtually none of it is well organized and since getting into my optical efforts, I try not to do too much dirty woodworking in the basement. I have moved some of these dust generating tools out into the garage.
 
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