Lathe Arrival and Testing
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.
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
that bench is far too clean and tidy.
This bench looks too tidy. Has it actually been used? Where’s the grease, metal filings, rusty cans etc etc?
[…] 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 […]
[…] mentioned in a previous blog about the arrival of the mini-lathe, my first project is a cutoff disk mandrel for a dremel like […]