I have a gazillion questions. Which one to ask first. So I guess I should ask about the horse,before the cart.
Grizzly is sort of close to me. I was in their show room a while back and looked at their benchtop lathes, 7x14/GO765 caught my eye. Sparked my interest again, last time I looked at them was close to 20 years ago, a lot of bad reports so I just kind of let it slide.
I have started casting my own bullets since then. I have had very good luck with what I have, but we always want better.
Most of my work would be on lube dies and maybe some expanders and or die parts.
Would this lathe satisfy me or do I need to look else where?
Room and good storage is my biggest issue, so the reason for a bench top type lathe.
Would I see any gain going to a 8x16 or 9x19? If there is a gain I will have to wait as my budget is shot, no pun intended, I fell into a deal on a rifle I had wanted for a longggg time. So my lathe and tooling budget took a hit.
If the smaller 7x14 can be made to work with some TLC, I could do that and still have some money for some tooling. 300 pounds is about all I want to try and get down the stairs to my basement.
I have a good friend that is a retired machinist and am pretty sure he will help me all he can with any issues. He has a shop at his house but is back to work out of town for a while.
As to a bench for these. I think I have access to a piece of machined surface plate that is about 3/4"x20x36. I thought that would make a good heavy top to help suck up some vibration along with stacking a few hundred pounds of my casting alloy under it.
I have spent a lot of hours on YouTube the past few days along with reading a bunch along with a lot of Mr Hoose' articles and videos.
It has been 20+ years since I have fooled witha lathe or a mill, so I class myself as on of the "knows enough to be dangerous" catagory.
A nice place you all have here. I look forward to learning and be able to show a project sooner or later.
TIA
Jeff
Grizzly is sort of close to me. I was in their show room a while back and looked at their benchtop lathes, 7x14/GO765 caught my eye. Sparked my interest again, last time I looked at them was close to 20 years ago, a lot of bad reports so I just kind of let it slide.
I have started casting my own bullets since then. I have had very good luck with what I have, but we always want better.
Most of my work would be on lube dies and maybe some expanders and or die parts.
Would this lathe satisfy me or do I need to look else where?
Room and good storage is my biggest issue, so the reason for a bench top type lathe.
Would I see any gain going to a 8x16 or 9x19? If there is a gain I will have to wait as my budget is shot, no pun intended, I fell into a deal on a rifle I had wanted for a longggg time. So my lathe and tooling budget took a hit.
If the smaller 7x14 can be made to work with some TLC, I could do that and still have some money for some tooling. 300 pounds is about all I want to try and get down the stairs to my basement.
I have a good friend that is a retired machinist and am pretty sure he will help me all he can with any issues. He has a shop at his house but is back to work out of town for a while.
As to a bench for these. I think I have access to a piece of machined surface plate that is about 3/4"x20x36. I thought that would make a good heavy top to help suck up some vibration along with stacking a few hundred pounds of my casting alloy under it.
I have spent a lot of hours on YouTube the past few days along with reading a bunch along with a lot of Mr Hoose' articles and videos.
It has been 20+ years since I have fooled witha lathe or a mill, so I class myself as on of the "knows enough to be dangerous" catagory.
A nice place you all have here. I look forward to learning and be able to show a project sooner or later.
TIA
Jeff