Lathe Arrival and Testing

Saupe MD200 Miniturn Lathe

The new/old lathe arrived yesterday and I did a test run of it today to find it’s quirks and nuances. I faced off and turned down a piece of scrap metal recovered from an old rotary washing line and got some fairly good results. I intentionally pushed it a little further than it could manage and as expected got some problems but I corrected these in a later pass.

Although I joked that my first project would be to make a washer, I now plan to make a mandrel for my mini-drill’s cut off disks to replace the one I made from a bolt that requires me to make the centre hole of the cut off disks larger. I have the material and drills for this but was missing an M2 tap and die, my tap set only goes down to M3. Thanks to SFC-Tooling on ebay, I’ve tracked down some taps and a die for a reasonable price, my usual suppliers Axminster and Chronos were charging significantly more for these items.

Facing off a bar

4 thoughts on “Lathe Arrival and Testing

  1. Rex says:

    that bench is far too clean and tidy.

  2. alan b says:

    This bench looks too tidy. Has it actually been used? Where’s the grease, metal filings, rusty cans etc etc?

  3. […] will spend hours discussing the best way to mend an old Betamax. Hence when it was heard that I had purchased a small lathe, a series of jobs was sent my way. Given that I’d not done much machining since last century […]

  4. […] mentioned in a previous blog about the arrival of the mini-lathe, my first project is a cutoff disk mandrel for a dremel like […]

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